


bury me in your memory

by playedwright



Series: in your heart i see [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternating Timelines, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Horror, Character Death (though it is not permanent), Confessions, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Fix It, Heavy symbolism, Introspection, M/M, Memories, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Temporary Amnesia, The Turtle CAN Help Us (IT), kind of, kind of on accident but its there, like..... vague allusions to but im gonna put a warning out there anyway, poor coping mechanisms, tagging just to be safe even tho im not sure it counts?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:33:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23589211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/playedwright/pseuds/playedwright
Summary: THERE IS A WAY,Maturin hums.“What is it?” Richie asks. There’s a smallness in his voice that he has never known before.A SACRIFICE,Maturin informs him, voice a low rumble.“Take me, man,” Richie says, voice breaking. His hands tremble as he smacks his chest. “You can fuckinghaveme if it brings him back.”NO,Maturin says.THAT IS NOT THE KIND OF SACRIFICE I REQUIRE FROM YOU.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: in your heart i see [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1994488
Comments: 88
Kudos: 522





	1. you said i killed you - haunt me then!

**Author's Note:**

> i genuinely started this fic after the third time i saw the movie in theaters and it took me seven months to finish it bc i kept getting distracted. and this is only part one! damn.
> 
> warnings before starting/ this is a fic that is basically resurrection, which means eddie is dead throughout a large chunk of it. as mentioned in the tags, there is also possible allusions to body horror. i'm not quite sure if this counts but i'm gonna put this here just in case.
> 
> fic title comes from a mitski song and chapter title comes from a quote from wuthering heights.
> 
> one last thing - a huge huge HUGE thanks to [kit](https://twitter.com/twomustards) for holding my hand throughout 75% of this and cheering me on and begging me for the rest. this probably would not have been finished if it weren't for her excitement. <3

It’s been a month.

He’s coping.

He _is._

Honestly, Beverly is just overreacting. Mike, too. He’s perfectly fine. So what if he hasn’t left Derry yet? It’s only been a month. He can take a fucking vacation.

“Seeing the sights, Rich?” Bev asks, in a tone of voice that implies she’s currently about to book a flight back to Maine. “Walking down memory lane?”

Richie snorts. “While I still can,” he says, even though they aren’t forgetting. Even though Beverly and Ben packed their bags and hopped on a boat, even though Bill took a plane back to Los Angeles, even though Mikey got on the first train out of Derry he could. They aren’t forgetting.

Her voice is gentle. Richie doesn’t allow himself to dwell on how much he hates it. “Haven’t you had enough of all our old haunts?”

There’s a question in her voice that she doesn’t ask. Richie wishes she fucking would. It’d be better than this—this goddamn eggshell-thin line they’re all walking where it concerns him. He wants some anger. Some yelling.

_Some banter_ , his mind supplies helpfully, and he promptly tells it to fuck right off.

“I’m feeling inspired, Bev,” he lies. It’s easier than the truth. “Writing my own shit for the first time in years. It’s good, too. Gonna ride it out as long as I can, if you catch my drift.”

“God, I hope it’s funnier than that line,” she says dryly. “Need someone to try it out on?”

“Sure. Ever heard the one about the repressed closeted kid who remembered he was gay when his childhood friend got turned into a shish kabob?”

Beverly sucks in a sharp breath. Richie forgets, sometimes, that it wasn’t just his loss. They _all_ lost Eddie. He is an incredibly selfish friend, and he feels guilty in an instant.

“Fuck me,” he mutters. He takes his glasses off and rubs tiredly at his eyes. “Beep beep, Rich.”

The other line is quiet for longer than Richie cares for. He wonders what Bev is looking at. Last he heard, they were somewhere off the coast of North Carolina. It’s probably humid as hell, so Bev’s hair is most likely reaching epic proportions of curly. Ben is probably still charmed by it. Richie hopes they take a thousand pictures of the sunrises.

“You know, Ben and I are thinking of porting back up in Maryland soon,” Bev says. He imagines she’s sitting on the edge of their bed next to the window, breathing in sea air and sucking down another cigarette. “Maybe you wanna meet us? Didn’t you have a show coming up near there?”

“Yeah, super close,” Richie mutters. “I’d fly into Baltimore and from there, it’s only a day and a half drive to the venue!”

She chuckles.

“Tour’s cancelled, Bevs, or didn’t you hear?” Richie says. God, now _he_ wants a cigarette. “Trashmouth Tozier got a phone call he never expected right before he went on stage, and only got back to Maine just in time to see his—”

The words stick in his throat, even though this is the bullshit excuse he fed his manager in the first place. Wasn’t hard to be convincing, since he could barely string together three words before forcing himself into a panic attack so bad Mike had to take the phone from him. He squeezes his eyes shut tight and prays to god he doesn’t start crying again.

“His _best friend_ die,” he mutters.

What a sad sack he makes. Jesus. He wonders when his friends will get sick of this self-deprecating, wallowing-in-self-pity bit and tell him to grow up.

“Richie.”

He slinks back in his chair and resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Well, I can’t very well go around calling him the love of my repressed gay life, now can I? That would ruin the punchline of my next opening bit.”

“ _Richie_.”

“Marsh, I’m gonna need you to literally say the words, _knock it the fuck off, Richie,_ or I don’t think I’m gonna be able to stop.”

“Beep beep,” she says gently. He has a clear image of her cradling the phone to her ear with two hands. Sometimes he wonders if the deadlights are still inside him, with how clear he can see his friends from time to time. When he’s less depressed, he thinks he’ll try fucking with them just to see. “Please come to Maryland. We miss you.”

Richie thinks about it. He thinks about pulling up his laptop and booking the first flight to Maryland and getting the hell out of dodge. It’d be expensive as fuck, but when isn’t it? He’d have to check multiple bags, to take Eddie’s shit with him—

Bile fills his mouth. He lurches forward before he can start dry-heaving.

_Beep beep,_ he thinks desperately, but the damage is already done.

“Tozier, are you still with me?”

“Not yet, Bev,” he croaks out. “God, I—fuck. _Fuck._ I can’t. Not yet.”

Beverly takes a deep breath. “Soon, Richie. It’s time. You have to let go of the unhealthy coping mechanisms sooner than later. And you know we’ll all be here for you. Forever.”

“I’ll quit my vice when you quit yours,” Richie mutters. Bev snorts, and in the background he can hear her flick on her lighter. “Fucking knew it. Filthy habit you’ve got there, Madam Marsh.”

“Your British accent still needs work,” she tells him honestly. The lighter snaps shut. 

Richie smiles, despite everything. Sometimes he thinks that’s the worst part. He can still smile. He’s fucking miserable, but he can _still smile._ “I’ll have you know I’m famous in many circles for my impressions.”

“And yet, you still sound like a wanker,” Bev shoots back. Her accent is surprisingly flawless.

“Beverly, I love it when you’re mean to me. Leave Ben and let’s run away together.”

She’s rolling her eyes. He doesn’t have to see her or have a psychic connection with her to know as much. “I’ve got to go,” she tells him. At least she truly sounds sorry. “Call me tomorrow?”

“When’s your day off from babysitting Richie duty?” he asks, no real heat behind it.

“Wednesday.”

“Oh, of course.”

There’s a smile in her voice when she says, “Richie. We love you. All of us do, but me and Ben especially. If you ever forget that, I’ll kick your ass.”

“Ooh, too soon for jokes about forgetting, Bev, I have twenty-seven years of repressed shit I’m still trying to work through.”

“Stop it,” she laughs. “If you don’t call me tomorrow, I’ll kick your ass, then too. Make good choices.”

“When don’t I?”

“Oh, you don’t want me to answer that,” Beverly sighs. “Bye, honey. Love you.”

Richie’s throat feels thick. He hopes some day that it gets easier to say it back to them, that the lump in his chest doesn’t feel like a fucking mountain he has to climb just to say _i love you_ back to his childhood best friends. “Back at ya, Marsh. Pass it on to Ben, will you?”

“You know I will,” she promises. 

He doesn’t doubt her for a second.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Mike left the library to Richie’s capable hands.

Well, not truthfully. Richie fudged the truth a little bit when he told Mike he only planned on staying for a few more days, so Mike left the library with someone who’s properly trained and actually knows things about books and, like, the Dewey Decimal System, but he left his loft to Richie for as long as he needed to use it. Richie takes it to heart and knows, by extension, that he owes it to Mike to look after the library.

They owe a lot of things to Mike, if Richie’s being honest.

Richie doesn’t work here, but the employees know him now by name and they smile when he comes in, and when he asks they let him put books back on their shelves. They don’t ask why he avoids the desks at the front or the display case once it’s repaired; they don’t ask him to leave on days where he just needs to sit in the middle of the floor and stare at empty space. They just press books into his hands and trust him to know where they go. It’s comforting, in a lot of strange ways; Richie has never been known for _order,_ but he is trusted with it here.

The Derry City Library is not a busy place, and there’s rarely more than a handful of people there at any given time. More often than not, Richie is the only one wandering the stacks. On the day he realizes that he actually _enjoys_ that, he goes up to the loft and pours himself a drink.

He’s still not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that being back in Derry is changing him.

His days feel circular. Wake up, force himself into the shower. Stumble down the stairs, eat whatever baked good Debbie presses into his hands, god _bless_ Debbie. Putter around uselessly until someone puts him to work. Wander aimlessly through the stacks and pull books off of shelves that strike his fancy. Eat a second meal at some point, then go back up to the loft and stare at the ceiling and wonder if things ever get fucking easier. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In the beginning, he scoured Mike’s books for anything that might mention resurrection. He lost sleep over it. Eventually he’d flipped through everything in Mike’s loft and came up empty-handed, so he’d taken his research downstairs. He went a day or two without sleep. He can’t quite remember.

Sometimes he switches things up and drives past all his old haunts. Looks in disdain at the Capitol. Passes hesitantly by the quarry. Cleans up the old clubhouse one day and falls asleep leaning against the old ladder. He drives past Eddie’s old house once, then vows never to again. Once he drives by his old house and laughs at the sight of the old, cracked rain gutter above his old bedroom window, still unrepaired after all this time. The old graffiti with his name is still written on the underside of the bleachers at the high school, and so is the big black dot where Richie scribbled out the awful things written about Beverly. The Kissing Bridge he frequents more often than he cares to admit. His carving doesn’t fade. Just the same as the graffiti never went away, and the old rain gutter never got repaired. Eddie’s house still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The lot at Neibolt remains collapsed. The people this town stole from him stay gone.

It’s Derry. Some things never change.

Until, of course, the day that Richie is sitting in an armchair in the library flipping idly through some kind of cookbook when a book falls off the shelf a few feet in front of him.

“Oh, not this fucking shit again,” Richie sighs.

He sits and stares at it for a long time, unwilling to get up from his chair and half-expecting Henry Bowers or some fucking Pomeranian monster to come barrelling towards him with intent to kill. But the book stays on the ground, dropped open right in the middle and probably creasing some pages. Logically Richie knows that Mike would probably kill him if he knew Rich was letting his books get fucked up. Richie sighs again, long and loud just for the hell of it, and grabs an umbrella from the side of his desk.

“If you’re gonna pop out and scare me, I’m gonna be armed, you little bitch,” he warns the book. He prods at it with the tip of the umbrella. Unsurprisingly, nothing happens. Richie sighs, not sure if he feels relieved or disappointed, and squats down. “ _A History of Old Derry_.”

It’s a well-loved book. At the back of his mind, he half-remembers Ben talking about the history of Derry and for a moment he’s certain it’s one and the same. There’s a break in the binding that opens right to the page about the fire that killed Mike’s parents.

“What kind of sadistic fuck would write a book about the history of this shithole?” Richie mutters. He snaps the book closed.

_Branson Buddinger._

Richie stares at the name. He stares at it until a half-fledged idea becomes a full one, and then he stares some more. “Huh.”

He doesn’t put the book back on the shelf.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Okay, so maybe he didn’t entirely give up hope on his whole resurrection plan.

The thing is, there’s just like. _Nothing_ readily available in Derry. And he’s fucking _checked._ He’s found a few places that might have a few more answers, if he could just find the balls to finally get the fuck out of this shit town, but he hasn’t gone yet. If he’s being honest, he feels like the universe owes him one, so he’s been waiting for something to fall into his lap.

Or, in this case, fall off a bookshelf.

Richie hadn’t been entirely banking on the universe to actually provide him a way to bring the dead back to life, but he’s got a good feeling about the book and the dude who wrote it. It feels like the right path to finally getting somewhere with this ridiculous pipe dream of his.

It takes Richie less time than he expected to find Branson Buddinger, which is great, except for that it lands Richie at the Derry Cemetery staring at a headstone with Buddinger’s stupid name and date of death on it. His half-assed, half-desperate plan goes out the window faster than he could fucking think of it.

“Fucker,” Richie says with feeling. Maybe he should have brought flowers or something. Anything would have been better than showing up to a cemetery empty handed, hoping the gravestone would have the secret to resurrection engraved on the back or something. “Who writes a whole history about fucking Derry, Maine, then goes off and dies right after? Actually, no, that’s probably like the most Derry thing you can do in Derry, Maine.”

The headstone does not reply.

“ _Mother_ fucker,” Richie emphasizes. He sinks down on the ground and pulls his knees to his chest. God, he’s so old, and he’s so fucking sick of the way his hip is aching like he’s been alive for a million years. He misses his dumb memory foam mattress back in L.A and his fancy ass insoles for his shoes.

Branson Buddinger’s gravesite remains quiet. Richie plucks a dandelion from the ground and tosses it up in the air.

“So here’s the sitch, Buddinger,” he says. He closes his eyes. “Imagine you’re me: gifted with an amazing sense of humor, tragically repressed, desperate to get out of your fuckall small town to start your life, but terrified to do it without your best friend slash maybe love of your life. You leave, you forget, you get famous for jokes that aren’t yours. Congrats, you’ve made it! Until you come back to your fuckall small town and, like, this massive ton of bricks gets dropped on you and the bricks are screaming, ‘hey dipshit, you’re in love with your childhood best friend!’ How do you cope?”

There’s not even so much as a gust of wind. Richie kind of hates this whole afterlife business. This town had a fucking muderous space clown, but it can’t have ghosts? Fucking bullshit, in his humble opinion.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he continues. “Just tell the dude! Except, he’s fucking dead. So, still pretending to be me, here’s what you do next: use jokes to cope with grief, stay tragically repressed, and become too terrified to leave your fuckall small town lest you forget the love of your life yet again.”

Richie leans forward. He stretches his legs out in front of him, groaning when his knees pop.

“What if the reason no one is forgetting is because one of us is still staying here?” Richie asks quietly.

Cue the laughter track. Richie’s not dumb enough to assume that the reason he’s staying here is because he’s worried about his friends forgetting. Christ.

No, he’s a lot more selfish than that.

“Okay, fine. You caught me. I want to bring him back! I’m going fucking insane here, man. There’s got to be a way, right? Some way to get Eddie back? I mean, _fuck._ I saw him in the future. I got caught in those stupid deadlights and I saw him. Like, grey and old and shit. So that kind of future has to be a possibility, right? If I saw it?”

He picks at a blade of grass and tosses that up in the air, too.

“Bev saw us all die,” he murmurs, “and I saw Eddie live. What the _fuck_ is that about?” 

Buddinger still has nothing to add to that.

“You’re a shitty conversationalist, my man,” Richie sighs.

Behind him, leaves and grass crunch as someone approaches. “Most dead people are,” says the voice accompanying the steps. “That’s why people don’t usually try and have conversations with them.”

Richie turns. There’s a girl, probably about twenty. Her hair is short and red, buzzed on the sides but curly and long on top. She reminds him of Bev, if he’d been allowed to know her while they were in their twenties.

“If some old fuck talking to a headstone in a cemetery is the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen in Derry, you haven’t been here long,” Richie tells her.

The girl smirks. “I’m afraid you won’t be getting much information out of old Branson,” she says. There’s an apology in her voice that sounds almost strange. “He killed himself a long while ago.”

Richie sucks in a sharp breath. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “I suppose all that knowledge of Derry’s darkest secrets would be enough to drive anyone batshit enough.”

Richie turns back to the headstone and rubs at his eyes. If he’s being honest, he’s not sure what he was hoping for, anyway. It was a longshot to think he’d even find Buddinger, let alone that Buddinger would have any information that could actually help him. He should seriously just cut his losses and get on a fucking plane.

Then the girl says, “You’re looking for something.”

Richie resists the urge to roll his eyes. This kid is just a kid, he has to remind himself, and just because he’s a sad and miserable old fuck doesn’t mean he gets to act _mean_ to someone half his age. “Don’t ask me what it is, you’d have me locked up if you knew.”

She snorts out a laugh. “Let me guess. You lost someone.”

“Yeesh. Am I that obvious?”

“Everyone who comes looking for Branson wants answers as to why their loved one is gone.” A stick cracks behind him, and the air seems to grow colder when she takes a seat next to him.

Richie peers at her from the corner of his eye. Her eyes are closed, her face tipped towards the sun. She’s comfortable in her own skin in a way Richie never got to be, not even when he was out of Derry. She _really_ reminds him of Bev.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

The corner of her mouth uplifts. “Are you hoping I have the answers?”

Richie just raises an eyebrow. “You’re acting like you do.”

It earns him another laugh. Without looking at him, the girl extends a hand and says, “Everyone calls me Budd.”

“Like, as in Buddinger?”

“As in, I have a reputation around here of being a massive pothead,” she corrects. Richie tells himself it’s stupid to be disappointed. He shouldn’t have ever gotten his hopes up in the first place. “But, the last name certainly helps. Jo Buddinger. Good ole’ Branson here’s my uncle.”

“Uncle?” Richie asks, shocked.

“He died before I was born,” she clarifies. She taps the side of her head. “Left all his stupid Derry knowledge for me to stash in my brain instead.”

Richie looks at her, not comprehending.

Budd sighs and tips her head back up, closing her eyes again. “Man, I was really hoping you’d just get it. One of these days I’m not gonna have to spell it out.”

“Listen, kid, I love a good riddle usually, but I’m way too fucking sober to be picking up what you’re putting down,” Richie says, feeling exhausted, suddenly, and sad in a bone-deep way he hasn’t felt in a few days. “Sorry about your uncle. I’m gonna take off.”

As he’s clambering slowly to his feet, she tells him, “You can’t leave Eddie here.”

His blood runs cold.

“What the fuck did you just say to me?” he demands.

Budd’s eyes open slowly, dazed. It takes a moment for her gaze to settle on Richie’s face, even as he looms over her. “Eddie,” she repeats slowly. “You can’t leave him here.”

“Leave him _where?_ ” Richie asks desperately. “Where the fuck is he, is he here? Is he alive? Fuck, _fuck,_ I knew we shouldn’t have left him in those fucking sewers, Jesus Christ, how did he _survive?_ Oh my god, I have to get back there _now_ —”

Budd stands quickly and puts a hand on his wrist. “Richie,” she says, even though he never told her his fucking _name,_ what the _fuck,_ but her touch calms him and he feels less frantic when she looks him in the eye. “He’s not here.”

“You just said—!”

“You have to go _get_ him,” she tells him. “You can’t leave him. You have to go get him.”

Richie’s heart is a frantic monster that is rattling in its cage, screaming so loud he’s certain it will be heard the second he opens his mouth. He’s amazed the whole world hasn’t stopped to listen to it yet. There’s something almost agonizing about the way hope starts to expand his lungs.

“Where is he?” Richie whispers, choked and terrified and desperate and hopeful all at once.

“He’s not here,” she repeats. She squeezes his wrist. “But he is near. You have to find him. Where it all began, Richie, do you remember? You will find him there. Eddie will be with him.”

His lungs are going to give out at any moment. “Budd, what the _fuck_ are you talking about? Where what began? Who is Eddie with?”

Budd’s gaze clears after one long, agonizing moment. She looks at Richie as though it’s the first time she’s actually seeing him. She looks startled, when she catches sight of her fingers around Richie’s wrist, and her mouth opens and closes a few times. 

“Budd,” Richie says slowly. “Dude, I need you to tell me what the fuck just happened.”

Her voice is choked when she finally speaks. “I don’t know,” she says honestly. She lets go of his wrist. “What did I say?”

  
“Fucking serious?” Richie asks. “What did you _say?_ ”

Budd cringes. “Yeah, I knew it was cliche as soon as I said it.”

Richie takes his glasses off and scrubs tiredly at his eyes. “Just that the dude I want to bring back from the dead is currently holed up somewhere with someone else so now I have to go find both of them, I guess.”

“Huh,” Budd muses. “Well. It does _sound_ like something I’d say.”

“Vague and completely unhelpful?” Richie deadpans.

“Hey, I didn’t pick the gift, I don’t get to pick what the gift likes to share, either.”

“Seems like an unfair deal.”

Budd shrugs and rubs self-consciously at her arm. “Yeah, well. We can blame that guy.” She points, and both she and Richie turn to look at Branson’s grave. “It’s his fault we’re in this mess, you know.”

Richie snorts. “I would argue that it’s the doing of a murderous transforming clown from space, but I can’t say that everyone’s had the same exact same experience as me.”

“I think that’s limited to the seven of you,” Budd agrees. She blinks in surprise; Richie gapes at her, open-mouthed. “Sorry. Sometimes I literally can’t control it.”

“Doesn’t that get annoying?”

Budd gives him a tired smile. “You get used to it.”

“Any chance you know what you meant by ‘where it all began’?” Richie asks, certain he already knows the answer but foolishly hoping otherwise. Everything started in this place and everything _ended_ in this place; how can he know exactly where he’s supposed to go?

Though, if he’s being honest with himself, he’d tear this entire town apart brick by brick if it meant he could hold Eddie again.

“I’m sorry,” Budd says apologetically. “Riddles, man. They’re fucking exhausting.”

“Yeah, well,” Richie mumbles. “Hopefully one day you find someone you don’t have to spell it out for. Bet this shit gets tiring real fast.”

She laughs. “You’ve got no idea.”

Richie isn’t sure if there’s a precedent for this. How do you end a conversation with someone who is probably psychic and just gave you the cryptic answers that will lead you back to the only guy you’ve ever loved? Halfheartedly, he thinks, as he gives Budd an aborted wave and tucks his hands in his pockets as he starts to walk forward, this would make one hell of a joke.

Too bad he’s not sure how to workshop literal magic into his comedy without being put in a hospital.

“Hey, Richie?” Budd says tentatively. He turns. “If it helps. I keep seeing glimpses of water. That might give you an idea for where to start.

He blinks slowly. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. It does.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


Richie’s first thought is, of course, the quarry. It frustrates him knowing he’s driven by this spot more than once and that it might be the place where he gets Eddie back. He wonders how many more times he would have passed it and not known.

He grips his steering wheel with white knuckles as he pulls off the road and parks his car in the only place there’s really room to leave a car before making a trek to the quarry. There’s anxiety knotting in his stomach that pulls tighter and tighter the more he thinks about making this walk, _again,_ without Eddie by his side.

Richie hasn’t been back here since that day. Not really. He’s never gotten out of the car. He’s never tentatively crossed the street and leaned against a tree when he started to dry-heave, terrified of taking the next step. He hasn’t made the familiar journey that he still remembers, even after twenty-seven years. He hasn’t leaned against the No Trespassing sign that wasn’t there when he left Derry the first time.

He’s not quite sure how he does it all now.

For a moment all he can do is stand at the edge of the cliff and stare down into the murky green water and wonder what the hell he’s doing. How he could let it get this far. He wonders, for once, at what point he’ll realize he’s chasing an impossible fucking dream and get the hell on with his life. He just _trusted_ Budd, someone he hadn’t even met before today and someone who lives in _fucking Derry,_ and what the hell does she know? It could be an elaborate prank. Everybody, come watch the court jester as he throws himself over the edge of a cliff in a pathetic attempt to save a dead man! Everyone point at the gullible fool who latched on to the idea that he might get his best friend back for even a second and laugh when he starts to tear up!

But hell. What _does_ Richie have to lose? So what if there’s nothing waiting for him at the bottom of this body of water? So what if he jumps and he comes back up for air with nothing in his hands but a rapidly fading hope? It’s not like it would be any different if he weren’t here. And maybe it is a prank, but Richie will be damned if he doesn’t give it a try regardless. For once in his miserable fucking life, Richie Tozier is gonna take this seriously.

He’s never been the first to jump off this ledge, not when it was him and all of his friends, but he is today. He doesn’t even hesitate.

There’s a rush of adrenaline that accompanies the freefall that feels like it’s being shot directly into his veins. He’s too caught up in it to even think of screaming as he falls, and he has one last cohesive, _desperate_ thought of Eddie’s face before he hits the water.

It’s quiet, underwater. All he can focus on is the pressure of the water around his ears. His eyes are squeezed shut but it doesn’t matter anyway because he knows he lost his glasses on impact and likely won’t be able to find them anyway. He sinks, sinks, sinks, until his heart feels so heavy he’s sure it’s going to either fall out of him or pin him to the quarry floor. Without opening his eyes, Richie lifts his arms and starts swimming towards the surface once again.

Once he breaches he sucks in a frantic breath and pushes his hair out of his face, rubbing water out of his eyes. It takes a moment to adjust to being above water again, and even without his glasses he can tell it’s just the same old regular fucking Derry. There’s no one in the water with him, there’s no one sitting on the beach waiting for him, there’s nothing. Just an idiot swimming in dirty water and squinting at the landscapes around him.

“Fucking shit, Tozier,” Richie mutters. A stray piece of hair falls in his face again, and he halfheartedly pushes it back up. “You’re really going off the deep end, man.”

At least the water is warm. It’s nice, even though he didn’t shed any layers before throwing himself into the water. He’ll probably regret it when he climbs out and his shoes are wet for the drive home, but right now he doesn’t care. He tips his face up towards the sun and closes his eyes again.

It’s easy to forget, even without a fucked up space clown taking away memories, that summer used to be Richie’s favorite part of Derry. It was stifling, living here sometimes, but the sun would come out and lift the tension from the air and as the hours in the day grew longer every day had felt infinite. If he thinks hard, he can’t remember the last time they all went to the quarry together, all seven of them, but he knows they did it a lot. Especially after it _was_ all seven of them, their little group of friends finally feeling like a real, complete thing. They’d been walking around missing a piece and none of them had known it. How long after everyone started to go had they continued going to the quarry anyway, desperately chasing that same feeling of _right_ they’d had when they were all together? When did they stop trying to go at all?

Where it all began. _This_ was the place where friends turned into family. This was the place where they all knew there was no turning back.

Richie shifts until he’s floating on his back, eyes still closed. A cloud passes over the sun and the day grows a little darker behind his eyelids. If he tries hard enough, he can remember what it was like to be fourteen and unstoppable instead of forty and desperately wishing for someone who wasn’t there. It’s a high he doesn’t mind chasing, if only for a few minutes.

Soon enough he will pull himself out of the water. He will stand on the beach and shake himself out and wring out his clothes as best as he can. He’ll take off his shoes and socks before he gets in his car and he’ll drive back to the library and he’ll stand under the hot water from the shower drain until he can’t feel his skin and he’ll fall asleep tired and hungry and sad and he’ll wake up and feel the exact same tomorrow. Lather, rinse, repeat. Same as fucking always.

Christ, he hopes he can leave this hellhole soon. Hopes that this is the final piece of convincing he needs to realize he should just move the hell on with his life.

It gets cold rapidly, with the sun still hiding behind a cloud, and it only takes a cold chill to breeze by and convince Richie it’s time to go. He’s struck suddenly by the realization that even as much as this place reminds him of the childhood he lost, it doesn’t feel the same. There’s no untouchable feeling, there’s no high for him to ride, there’s no taste of summer and ice cream and bike rides in the air and his friends’ laughs aren’t echoing in his ear. He can remember it all he wants, he can relish in the fact that he _can_ remember, now, but he can’t get it back.

He can’t get Eddie back.

Richie opens his eyes, but he is not in the quarry.

His heart bottoms out.

He’s still floating, but he is no longer on his back, instead suspended upright as if he’s in midair. If he focuses hard enough, he can still feel the sensation of the water lapping against his fingers. His clothes are not wet, his glasses are back on his face. There is nothing and everything surrounding him. A black vastness that flickers and shifts the same way water does when you’re immersed in it, except for Richie can’t see anything but brief glimpses of light in the same way that rays of sun break through water.

_What the fuck,_ he thinks, but the words come out of his mouth.

For a brief, horrifying moment he is certain he’s dead or going to die, drowning in this vast space that must be the bottom of the quarry. Did he sink without noticing it? Was his death peaceful, quiet, easy? He can feel his heart still beating in his chest; he can feel it when he presses his fingers over his sternum. Frantic and heavy but definitely there.

“What the fuck?” he says, again.

It comes to him slowly, the realization that he’s not alone. It eases its way inside of his veins, warm, comforting. There is something else here with him.

His heart is in his throat, now. He works impossibly hard to speak around it.

“Eds?” he whispers. Tentative. His voice barely carries through the vast space around him.

The air around him seems to take a deep breath. Richie is holding his.

But as suddenly as the brief thought had popped into his head, it vanishes. The comforted feeling doesn’t leave, though. Whoever is here, it isn’t Eddie, but Richie doesn’t feel any fear.

“Hello?” he tries again. “Who are you?”

There’s another rumble in the air, then a creaking sound like a jaw opening for the first time in centuries. _I AM MATURIN,_ says a voice, and Richie knows that whatever this is has been around for longer than Richie can even begin to comprehend. _HELLO, RICHIE._

“Maturin,” Richie repeats. “That ain’t a name you hear every day.”

_YOU ARE MAKING JOKES TO COPE WITH YOUR CONFUSION,_ Maturin says, like he knows Richie at all. _I UNDERSTAND. I MADE YOU, AFTER ALL. YOUR UNIVERSE. YOUR HOME. YOUR FAMILY. I KNOW EVERY FACET OF YOU, RICHIE. I AM GLAD YOU ARE HERE NOW._

“So, what, you’re like. God?” Richie asks, disbelieving. “So I am fucking dead?”

_YOU ARE NOT DEAD. YOU FOUND ME ON YOUR OWN. THAT IS NOT SOMETHING MANY PEOPLE ACCOMPLISH._

“In all honesty, I didn’t know I was looking for you,” Richie admits.

_I AM AWARE. YOU CAME HERE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING ELSE._

All too well Richie is aware of his heartbeat; he can feel it in his wrists, he can feel it in his stomach, he swallows around where it still rests in his throat. “God, I’m fucking transparent, aren’t I? Do I have a neon sign above my head that says ‘Local Idiot Wants To Bring Friends Back From The Dead’? Is that following me around?”

_PEOPLE DO NOT FIND ME UNLESS THEY ARE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING._

“Is he with you?” Richie asks, quiet and desperate. He’s two seconds away from taking his beating heart right out of his chest and showing it for the whole world to see. “Is Eddie with you?”

_WHO ELSE WOULD HE BE WITH?_ Maturin inquires.

Richie shrugs, and wonders if Maturin can even see it. “Honestly, I kind of hoped he’d be with Stanley. That I could bring them both back, you know?”

There’s a sound and a rumble like Maturin is humming. It’s ten seconds that Richie counts in his head before Maturin finally speaks again. _IT IS NOT WITHIN YOUR POWER TO BRING STANLEY BACK._

“Well, that doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Richie mutters. “I can bring back Eds but not Stan? I can’t get, like, a buy-one-get-one-free deal on resurrection?”

_NO,_ Maturin says. _YOU MISUNDERSTAND. IT IS NOT WITHIN YOUR POWER. YOU CANNOT._

“I heard you the first time, man!” Richie snaps. “I can’t bring Stan back, one of my best friends has to stay dead and I have to fucking live with it! Fine. But can you _please_ fucking tell me if there’s a way to bring Eddie back or if I’m just doing all of this shit for fucking nothing? Is there a way?”

_THERE IS A WAY,_ Maturin hums. Richie can feel the vibration of it rattling around in the space between his lungs. If he were a foolish man, he might call it hope.

But hell, hasn’t he proved that already? What part of his dignity remains, the living man searching fruitlessly to bring back someone who may not even return his love? Dignity be damned. He _needs_ hope.

“What is it?” Richie asks. There’s a smallness in his voice that he has never known before.

_A SACRIFICE,_ Maturin informs him, voice a low rumble.

“Take me, man,” Richie says, voice breaking. His hands tremble as he smacks his chest. “You can fucking _have me_ if it brings him back.”

_NO,_ Maturin says. _THAT IS NOT THE KIND OF SACRIFICE I REQUIRE FROM YOU._

“Then _what_?!” he shouts. He wants to throw his hands up, he wants to bang on the walls, he wants to yell until his throat bleeds and he wants to cry until there’s nothing left inside of him. Hope, it seems, is a far more desperate thing to feel than anguish. “Give me a straightforward answer here, dude, I’m terrible at math!”

_YOU ARE NOT,_ Maturin states. There is almost an amused lilt in his voice. _YOUR FRIEND MIKEY SAID IT BEST. DO YOU REMEMBER, RICHIE?_

Richie scoffs. He thinks he might be crying, but there is an exhaustion in him that runs too deep for him to be sure. He wonders if this is what the rest of his life will be like. Exhaustion and sadness and the last, desperate fragments of hope still clinging to his skin. “I’m assuming you’re omniscient, so you probably already know what happened the last time someone wanted me to remember something that was said in the past. It took me a hot second to think about it.”

_I HAVE TIME._

Richie wipes at his face. “I suppose you do.”

And he thinks. He thinks all the way back to that first phone call, two minutes to showtime. He thinks about the way his heart bottomed out just by looking at the call screen. He thinks about the warmth that filled him when he heard Mike’s voice. How his first memory, as the dust finally started to settle as soon as he hit the road, was of a shaky hand holding an inhaler. The weight off his chest when he arrived at the Jade, how the stress of a last minute flight and some asshole at the rental car company didn’t actually matter as soon as everyone was altogether there in one room.

“He said… only we can defeat IT,” Richie says slowly. His throat feels thick. “And that we had to believe.”

_YOU ARE CLOSE,_ Maturin tells him. _BUT THIS IS NOT THE ANSWER I AM SEEKING. THINK HARDER._

“Chill out, man, you said you had time,” Richie retorts, but there’s no malice in his tone. He wonders if it’s even possible to _be_ malicious towards an all-knowing God-Thing. Richie squeezes his eyes shut. He thinks it makes a difference. “I’m gonna throw it out there and assume you aren’t looking for something Mike said when we were bullying a clown to death?”

In an instance, Richie is flooded with something warm. It feels like laughter.

_NO,_ Maturin tells him.

“Did you enjoy that, though?” Richie asks, morbidly curious.

The void is empty while Maturin deliberates. It’s a long moment before he finally admits, _PERHAPS._

Richie finds comfort in the fact that he can laugh at that. 

“When we were searching for our tokens,” Richie realizes, after another beat of time passes. It comes back to him clearly the harder he thinks about it. He wonders if he’s imagining the excitement that expands in the space around him. “Mike mentioned a sacrifice. I made a shitty joke.”

_YES,_ Maturin agrees. 

Richie writhes his hands together. A habit he made and broke during the early stages of his career, when his stage fright was at its worst, before he realized that it was just always going to be a part of him and tried to shoulder through. He tries not to dwell on what it could mean that the habit is returning now.

“He said… we buried the past?” Richie asks. “He said we’ll have to dig it up?”

The same low humming sound fills the space around him once again. _YES,_ Maturin assures him. _A SACRIFICE. THAT IS THE WAY._

“Piece by piece,” Richie recalls. He’s cutting his way through a fog. He is almost chasing an echo. “So. What? You want me to start from scratch? Buy one best friend, get one free memory wipe? Because if amnesia is the winning lotto ticket for Eddie’s life, then I’m a gambling man.”

_NO,_ Maturin tells him. _I WILL NOT BE TAKING YOUR MEMORIES. YOU WILL BE GIVING THEM TO ME._

“What’s the fucking difference?”

_THERE IS MUCH DIFFERENCE._

“Dude, I swear to god,” Richie starts. Whatever else he was going to say dies in his throat. “I can’t even fucking say that to you, because. Like. You’re God, right? I can’t swear on you, to you. Right?”

_I AM A GOD,_ Maturin agrees. _THERE MAY BE MORE THAN ONE. THERE MAY ONLY BE ME. I HAVE NOT DISCERNED CONFIRMATION EITHER WAY._

“Okay, well, then, I swear to you, man, I need your answers to be like eighty percent less cryptic,” Richie says. “I already had to deal with the cryptic bullshit from Budd, and that's enough to make anyone’s head spin. Is it too much to ask for to get one easy answer?”

_YOU THINK RESURRECTION SHOULD BE EASY?_

“Well, when you say it like _that,_ ” Richie mutters. “Fine. It’s complicated. I can deal. How do I _give_ you my memories? Want me to tell you a fucking story? I’ve got one or two bouncing around in the noggin. Truth be told, I’ve got a whole childhood full of ‘em that I actually remember now. Which ones do you want?”

_YOU CANNOT TELL ME THE MEMORIES. IT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. YOU HAVE TO DIG THEM UP._

“But _how_?” Richie asks. “Dude, come on!”

That same warm laughter from before floods him again. _YOU ARE RIGHT,_ Maturin admits. _YOU HAVE FIGURED MUCH OF THIS OUT ON YOUR OWN. I CAN GIVE YOU THE ANSWER FOR WHAT COMES NEXT._

“Finally, damn,” Richie mutters. “Uh. All due respect.”

_TO DIG UP THE MEMORIES, YOU MUST FIND THEM WITHIN YOURSELF,_ Maturin continues. There’s a sharp bite of cold around him, almost like a breeze. Richie isn’t sure if he’s still underwater or not. _THEY ARE HIDDEN WITHIN YOUR BODY, AS MANY OF OUR MEMORIES ARE. FIND THEM. AND GIVE THEM TO ME._

“Okay, man, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but that didn’t clear anything up,” Richie groans. “They’re within me? Yeah, that’s where most people’s memories are. In the real world you don’t just go around handing them to people and wishing them luck with whatever shitty thing you wanted to forget.”

_I WILL MAKE THE FIRST ONE EASY,_ Maturin hums, and that same amused lilt is back. _YOU CAN FIND ONE MEMORY STORED IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND. RETRIEVE IT, AND GIVE IT TO ME._

“The scar?” Richie asks. His hand flexes involuntarily. “That went away, dude, I’m sorry. Faded after the clown kicked the bucket.”

_NOT THAT HAND. YOUR OTHER. IT IS IN YOUR PALM._

Richie raises his right hand. It looks as normal as it always has, the same hand he’s lived with for forty years. With his left hand, he presses his thumb into the center of his palm. Something in the atmosphere tightens around him. He presses harder. His nails are short and blunt but it doesn’t take much pressure for them to leave a mark on his palm. He watches, slowly, stunned silent, as the mark deepens itself once he pulls his other hand free. Blood breaks through the skin, small. A tiny droplet.

“Is that what you want?” Richie asks. “Is that how I give the memory to you?”

_IT IS ONE WAY, YES,_ Maturin tells him. Richie extends his palm.

Slowly, almost shyly, the drop of blood manages to fall from his hand towards the ground. Richie watches as it falls, falls, falls, growing bigger as it goes, until it’s no longer red but the exact same blue that used to be painted on his bedroom walls before he covered them with posters. It continues to grow until the whole vastness is taken over by the memory, Richie’s childhood bedroom coming to life before his very eyes. Down to the scores he carved on his dresser right next to his bed. Down to the Polaroid picture of him and Eddie barely peeking out from behind his Back To The Future poster.

“What the fuck?” Richie whispers.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  





Richie had been trying to work on his homework, honest, but he had no choice besides tossing it all aside the second Eddie appeared in his doorway, slightly out of breath from the bike ride over and looking so angry Richie was certain he might die tonight. He closed his math workbook slowly and stretched his legs out on his bed.

“Your mom lets you do your homework in your room?” Eddie demanded.

“Yeah, dude, I can’t focus if I’m at the kitchen table,” Richie explained. “Plus, I’m eleven now. Which means I get more privileges.”

Eddie scowled. “That’s not fair. Mommy makes me do all of my homework at the kitchen table and she asks me every time if I want her to go over it and make sure my answers are right.”

“She probably makes you stay there because you still call her _mommy_ ,” Richie said. “We’re in the sixth grade now, Eds, you have to start asking her to treat you like you’re growing up.”

“We _aren’t_ growing up, Richie, we’re only eleven!” Eddie snapped.

Richie raised his hands in mock surrender. “Whoa, dude. Okay. Did you come over here just to yell at me ‘cause I get to do my homework in the comfort of my own room or was there a purpose to your cute, cute face showing up in my bedroom?”

“I hate you,” Eddie muttered. “I should have gone to Bill’s.”

“No, no!” Richie said quickly, stumbling too fast to his feet and nearly falling off the bed. “You’re here now. So you gotta stick here.”

Eddie looked up at him with wide eyes. “I told Mommy,” he started, but his brow furrowed and he took a deep breath before he started again. “I told _Mom_ that I had a science project to work on with someone from school so I could come over. She is going through Dad’s old things again and talking about how she’s gonna throw all of it away but her keep pile is bigger than her donate pile. I just… I can’t be there, Rich.”

Richie blinked, a little taken aback by his friend’s earnestness. They’ve known each other for six years now, thank you very much, but the very foundation of their friendship was never earnesty. Richie would thank Bill later for teaching him that word.

“Well you came to the right place, _dah-lin,_ we can get you set up all nice and cozy at Casa de Tozier,” Richie said, in a truly awful Southern accent. Eddie scowled again. “No, I’m serious. Hey, my dad finally caved and bought a new VCR player, do you wanna go watch Star Wars?”

After a moment, Eddie’s expression cleared. He gave Richie a tentative smile. “Yeah, actually,” he agreed. “That sounds great.”

It wasn’t until later, when they were both collapsed on the heaps of pillows and blankets they had brought down for the best movie-viewing experience possible, right after Richie had popped the cassette in, that Eddie asked in a tentative voice, “Can we have popcorn too?”

Richie clambered to the kitchen and his mom gave him a smile and a small kiss on the head as she placed a bowl of popcorn, already made and ready for them, into his arms.

Eddie’s hand brushed against Richie’s more times than Richie could count. He was too young to wonder if it was deliberate or not but old enough to understand that the butterflies that grew rapidly in his stomach meant something. For the first time in his life Richie finally understood why his mom and dad held hands when they went out to the grocery store, or when they went to the movies, or when they went for one of their walks around the block. Richie’s palm was burning, and all he could think about was how badly he wanted to have Eddie’s palm pressed against it. Just once. Just to see what it felt like. He was certain that if he ever got the chance to find out how it felt, he would never forget it ever in his life.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“What the _fuck?_ ” Richie repeats, gasping for air and lurching backwards. There is no ground for him to stumble on, nothing to catch him as he throws himself out of the memory, no surface for him to fall to his knees on as he sucks in desperate breath after breath. His chest is tight. “What the _fuck_ was that?!”

_YOU HAVE GIVEN ME YOUR FIRST MEMORY,_ Maturin tells him. _THIS MEMORY. IT IS IMPORTANT TO YOU, YES?_

“Christ,” Richie gasps. “I’d. I had fucking forgotten. I didn’t remember it, specifically, but I knew that we were watching Star Wars when I realized I had a crush on him. Every time I watched Star Wars, even after I moved away, my hand would twitch like I was expecting someone to reach out and hold it. I never. I never fucking knew why.”

_THEY ARE FICKLE THINGS, MEMORIES,_ Maturin says. _THEY ARE MORE COMPLICATED FOR YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS. THEY WERE TAKEN FROM YOU ONCE. IN DOING THIS, THEY WILL NOT BE TAKEN AGAIN._

“But I’m _giving_ them to you!” Richie says, frantic and desperate and fearful that whatever he just lived through was for nothing. “I am!”

_YES,_ Maturin agrees. _THAT IS WHAT MAKES THIS DIFFERENT. I AM NOT TAKING THEM AWAY. YOU ARE GIVING THEM._

“How many do I have to give you?” Richie asks. “How many times do I have to live through whatever I just lived through?”

_YOU WILL KNOW WHEN YOU HAVE GIVEN ENOUGH._

Richie scoffs out a laugh. In all honesty, he’s not sure what else he had expected if not more cryptic answers. But it strikes him suddenly that even as exhausted as he is, this is his one and _only_ chance to see Eddie again. It doesn’t matter if he’s so tired his bones are about to dissolve into the floor. It doesn’t matter if reliving these memories feels like he’s slowly carving out his heart and throwing it aside, scarred and broken but still beating. Eddie is at the end of this. That’s what matters.

“Fine,” he says resolutely. “Then let’s do this shit again. What’s next?”

Maturin’s chuckle warms Richie’s blood. _I AM SORRY. YOU MUST FIND THE REST ON YOUR OWN. IT IS THE WAY._

“You know, I didn’t expect a god to have a sense of humor,” Richie comments. He raises his hands and starts to inspect them, wondering if something else is hiding within them. “Kind of an ego boost, though. Next time someone says my comedy career is failing, I can be like. Yeah, well, I made God laugh, so.”

_FOCUS, RICHIE._

“Yeah, yeah.”

His hands look the same, minus one scar he carried for 27 years without realizing it and plus one tiny indent on the palm of his right hand, already fading like it never happened. The same hairs on the backs of his hands are there; the same prominent veins in his wrist. His wonky thumbs and his crooked ring finger that never healed right after he broke it once in his twenties

Almost imperceptible, there’s a tiny little sliver of something that has lodged itself right underneath the skin of Richie’s knuckle. Richie is certain it wasn’t there before he jumped into the quarry. It is small, but it doesn’t hurt; and with surprising ease he is able to pull it out with only his fingernails.

“Is this one?” he asks.

_I BELIEVE SO._

Richie peers curiously at it. There’s nothing resounding about it. A regular old wood sliver that probably would have hurt like a bitch has he felt it pierce his skin. There’s no discerning details that could give an explanation as to where this memory will take him.

He drops it.

In the same way that the droplet of blood had increased in size the further it fell, the sliver of wood grows steadily, steadily, steadily, until it's one of the planks that lined the road at the kissing bridge. Slowly the plank turns into the rest of the bridge, but the other details don’t come. Richie can’t see the tunnel. He can’t see the creek but he can hear it. There’s no sun or moon; just the same black vastness now with a displaced bridge waiting to be explored.

Richie’s carving is front and center, at the heart of all of it.

Something in his chest expands.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_1989._

Eddie was always a little shit to Richie but it was a little infuriating to know that Eddie could pedal faster than him. The fucker had _asthma,_ for fuck’s sake, that should have been a point in Richie’s favor.

“Told you I was faster than you!” Eddie called smugly, from where he was a good few feet ahead of Richie. He had just gotten his cast removed and he was determined to prove he could still do things like normal.

“Slow down, dickweed,” Richie whined. He panted as he pushed his legs harder to try and catch up. “This is so not fair.”

Eddie’s laughter echoes around him. He slowed down as he reached the kissing bridge, turning in a circle once before coming to a stop near the wood. Richie’s heart leaped into his throat; if Eddie looked down, he’d be able to see the carving Richie put in there over the summer.

“You’re just upset ‘cause I was right,” Eddie said. “Broken arm didn’t mean I forgot how to ride a bike, fuckface. And I’ve always been faster than you.”

Richie grumbled as he finally caught up, coming to a stop in front of Eddie. His eyes darted nervously to the carving. “Yeah, well. Bill’s faster than you.”

“He’s not, we all just let him win and you know it.”

Richie laughed, bright and startled. “Fuck you, I haven’t been letting him win! He’s just fast! Swear to God his bike is magical.”

Eddie snorted. “It’s not hard to be faster than you, Richie, you have like five cans of Coke each day. You can’t keep putting shit like that in your body, my mom says that doctors are saying it gives you cancer.”

“Cigarettes give you cancer, Eddie baby, but I don’t see you yelling at me and Bev for those bad boys,” Richie drawled.

“I _do_ yell at you guys for them, you just don’t fucking listen to me,” Eddie retorted. He sat back on his bike and crossed his arms, eyes vibrant with that righteous anger that never ceases to make Richie’s heart pound just a little bit harder. After a moment, Eddie’s expression softened. “What the fuck are we gonna do without her when she moves away to be with her aunt for good?”

It was a sore topic for everyone, and Richie hated it every time it was brought up. No one wanted to think about what it meant for the club when Beverly left. They’d only had one summer together, all seven of them; it wasn’t fair to lose that before anything even had a chance to begin.

“She’s finishing out the school year,” Richie said. “We at least have that. And she said her aunt is coming here for a bit to take care of her so she might even stay for next year. Why do we keep fucking talking about this?”

Eddie’s brow furrowed, frustrated and sad. “I don’t like talking about it either but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s gonna happen, Rich.”

“Yeah, well,” Richie snapped. “Maybe I don’t wanna fucking think about it until it fucking happens! We still have time. We might get a whole other summer. Chill the hell out, man.”

“Whoa, Richie, breathe,” Eddie said in surprise, lifting up his hands in a placating gesture. “Fuck. I’m sorry, okay? It’s just fucking weird and I can’t wrap my head around it, that’s all.”

Richie wiped furiously at his eyes, angry and mortified that he was crying at all. His glasses dangled precariously in his free hand. “Christ, what the fuck is wrong with me?” he whined.

“Mom says we get more emotional when we start going through puberty,” Eddie supplied helpfully.

“I already went through puberty, that’s how I’m able to give your mom such sweet, sweet lovin’ every night, am I right?” Richie joked, raising his hand for a high five. His glasses went tumbling out of his grip. “Oh, fuck—”

“Jesus Christ,” Eddie snapped.

They both bent down at the same time, leaning close enough together that Eddie’s head bumped against Richie’s. It was barely more than a tap, but Richie panicked hard enough he lurched to the side and crashed into the wooden plank of the bridge, tumbling off his bike.

“Jesus Christ, Richie!”

“Ow,” he groaned, unsticking his hand from the post where he’d tried to catch himself. His glasses were somewhere on the gravel. “Fuck.”

“Are you okay?!” Eddie yelled, jumping off his own bike and letting it crash to the ground. He bent down and picked up Richie’s glasses, placing them carefully on Richie’s face.

Richie’s cheeks flushed a bright red.

“I think I have a splinter,” he whined, pulling his head away from Eddie’s hands and raising his own hand to examine it. Sure enough, there was a tiny sliver pinching under his skin. “Oh my Christ, my hand is gonna fall off.”

“Shut up,” Eddie snapped, and he tugged Richie’s hand towards him with both of his own. His grip was gentle as he examined Richie’s hand, thumb tracing lightly over the skin right underneath the splinter. “It’s just a small splinter, your arm is not going to fall off.”

Richie cackled. “That’s rich coming from you, Eds, you told me once your eyes would fall out if you didn’t eat enough carrots.”

“A splinter may not kill you but I might,” Eddie said darkly. “Come on. We’re close enough to your house. We can go back and I’ll pull it out.”

“That’s what I told your mom last night—” Richie started to say, but it was interrupted by Eddie shoving his shoulder so hard he bumped against the wooden planks again. Richie’s laughter was boisterous and easy. “Jesus, are you trying to give me more splinters?”

Eddie scoffed. “You know, I’m gonna pull that splinter out with tweezers, so by comparing the two you basically just told me you need tweezers to pull out your dick. I knew your jokes were fake.”

“Oh, Eds, do you wanna see for yourself?”

Eddie shoved at him again. Richie was still laughing as his feet stumbled underneath him.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s no easier to come out of the second time, and for a moment Richie is sure he’s stumbling backwards as he gasps for breath. The memory below him dissipates slowly until the bridge is gone entirely.

_DEEP BREATHS, RICHIE,_ Maturin says.

“I’m fucking trying,” Richie chokes out. He curls his hands into fists but it doesn’t make it any easier to breathe. His chest is bursting, so big and painful he’s certain his heart is going to give out before the end of this. “I think I’m having a fucking anxiety attack.”

Maturin hums. _THAT IS NOT UNUSUAL, I AM AFRAID. DO WHAT YOU MUST. WE CAN RESUME WHEN YOU ARE READY._

“Can’t you make it just go _away_?” Richie begs.

_IT IS NOT WITHIN MY POWER._

Richie laughs around a sob. His head is spinning, but he focuses on the laces of his shoes until he can clear it long enough to remember any of the tricks his therapist taught him. He crosses his arms over his chest, still sucking in desperate breath after breath, and lightly pats against his collarbone until the tension in his torso starts to lessen.

_BETTER,_ Maturin comments.

“Thanks,” Richie snaps dryly. He thinks he’s still crying. “ _Fuck_.”

Breathe in, hold it, breathe out. Richie tries so hard to be aware of his breathing that he actually misses it when it starts to regulate. He keeps patting against his collarbone anyway. Alternating from side to side until he feels less like his head is gonna fall off of his body and his chest is going to explode. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“Anxiety attack in front of an omniscient god-being,” Richie says. “Guess I can cross that off the bucket list.”

_YOU DO NOT NEED TO MAKE JOKES FOR MY SAKE, RICHIE. I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE FEELING REGARDLESS._

Richie laughs humorlessly, borderline hysteric as he tries to keep himself calm. His head is finally starting to clear. “Oh, well, when you say it like that, I feel like a piece of shit.”

_THAT IS NOT MY INTENTION._

“I know, I know. Jesus,” Richie mutters. He takes his glasses off and wipes at his eyes, unsurprised when it comes back wet. He raises his head tiredly. “Any chance one of those bad boys was being stored in my uncried tears?”

_WE CAN FIND OUT,_ Maturin says, right as a tear drips from Richie’s hand into the abyss below him.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_1981_.

“Mommy, I’m scared!” Richie cried, clinging tighter to her legs. She wore her blue dress, Richie’s most favorite on her, and he was certain this meant she couldn’t drop him off here and leave him alone.

His mom gently pulled him off of her legs and lifted him into her arms. She brushed his hair out of his face. “It’s okay to be scared, Richie,” she told him. “Being scared just means you have a chance to be brave.”

Richie brightened up. “Brave like Luke Skywalker!”

“Yes, _exactly_ like Luke Skywalker,” she agreed, bumping her nose against his and pinching his Star Wars backpack until he giggled. “And you know what happened for Luke when he left Tatooine?”

Richie thought really, _really_ hard. “He meets Leia and Han and Chewy?”

“That’s right,” she told him. “He makes friends. And you’ll make friends at kindergarten. So you have to go, honey.”

“Mommy,” Richie whined. Tears filled his eyes. “What if I don’t make any friends?”

“Well, you have to go in there first to even try,” she said. She put him back on the ground and squeezed his hand. “Are you ready to go in, honey?”

Richie looked at the school as critically as he could at five whole years old. He watched the other boys and girls going inside with their mommies or daddies. Then he looked back up at his mom and said in his best Luke Skywalker voice, “I have a very bad feeling about this.”

“Richie,” she said around a laugh. She pulled him forward by the hand again and this time he didn’t try to stop her.

His mom introduced him to a nice looking lady with yellow hair who told him to call her Miss Peach. He took her hand when she extended it to him and let himself be ushered into the room. She told him that he gets his very own hook to hang his backpack on and shows him where his seat is.

“That’s my name!” he said excitedly, when they reached the table and he caught sight of his name written on shiny paper on the table. “My mommy taught me how to spell it.”

“That’s right, Richie,” Miss Peach agreed. “Now you’ll never forget where your seat is. Oh, look, and you already have a new friend sitting at your table! Richie, this is Eddie, can you say hi?”

He peered curiously at the boy in the seat next to him. He was wearing a funny shirt, like the ones Richie saw his dad wearing sometimes. His eyes went wide when he turned to look at Richie.

He hid behind Miss Peach’s legs.

“Eddie, this is Richie,” Miss Peach said to the other boy. She pressed gently against Richie’s back to encourage him forward.

Eddie swallowed thickly and looked between Miss Peach and Richie a few times. Then he held his hand out, in the same way Richie had seen his dad do sometimes when nice people came over to the house. It’s such a grown-up thing to do that it made Richie giggle. He came out from behind Miss Peach and grabbed on to Eddie’s hand.

“Hiya,” Richie said.

“I’m Eddie,” the boy said.

Richie dropped his hand. “That’s cool. Hey, Eds, do you like Star Wars?”

“My name is _Eddie,_ ” he said again. He sat back down in his chair and looked critically at Richie. “But. Yes. My daddy and I watch it a lot. It’s my favorite.”

Excited, Richie plopped down into his own chair. “Mine, too!”

Eddie had a small smile that Richie really liked. He’d never seen anyone smile like that before, like he was still trying to figure out how to do it right. Eddie looked away for just a second before looking back at Richie. “Do you wanna be friends?” Eddie asked quietly. “You’d be my first one ever.”

Richie’s grin was stretched from ear to ear.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He’s pulled out of the memory before he feels like it’s concluded, thrown back into the vastness and the same place where just moments before he had been panting for breath. His heart is hammering once again.

“I don’t remember that one,” Richie chokes out. His eyes are wide, frantically darting from side to side hoping he’ll catch another glimpse of that memory before he fades. “I always knew I met him in kindergarten, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t _remember._ ”

_THAT IS NOT UNUSUAL,_ Maturin says again. _THAT WAS A VERY YOUNG MEMORY. THIS IS LIKELY WHY YOU WERE PULLED OUT OF IT. THOSE ARE USUALLY DIFFICULT TO TRULY GRASP._

“We’ve known each other our whole lives,” Richie whispers. “I knew him. I knew. We knew each other _forever._ How could I just forget him after that? Jesus, I was. We were friends before his _dad died_ and I didn’t even remember that. How did I forget him?”

_DO NOT BLAME YOURSELF FOR SOMETHING IT TOOK FROM YOU,_ Maturin asks of him. _YOU HAVE DONE WHAT YOU CAN TO REPAIR WHAT IT TOOK. YOU ARE DOING WHAT YOU CAN._

“It’s fucking hard, man.”

_IT IS. BUT IT WILL GET EASIER._

“ _When?_ ” Richie asks, desperate and split in two. He is both overwhelmed by the intensity of his feelings and numb to the way they run their course through his body as he relives things he hadn’t even realized he’d forgotten.

_YOU KNOW I CANNOT ANSWER THAT FOR YOU._

Richie runs both hands through his hair and closes his eyes again. “I know,” he admits. “That doesn’t make it any fucking better, you know?”

_YES._

A thought occurs to Richie then, unbidden and echoing in his ears. He can feel it heavy against the palms of his hands. “Would it have mattered?” he asks. He doesn’t know if he’s more afraid to hear the answer or never know. “If I had remembered him? If we had remembered each other? Would it have even mattered?”

Richie is certain he isn’t going to get a response. It surprises him then, when Maturin answers, _IT WOULD HAVE CHANGED EVERYTHING._

“Fuck,” Richie breathes out, all in one painful exhale. It tugs on his heartstrings. He can hear his pulse in his ears. “Fuck. I shouldn’t have asked that.”

Maturin chuckles that same low, earthquaking laugh. _I WOULD NOT HAVE ANSWERED IF I DID NOT THINK YOU COULD STAND TO HEAR IT._

“Gee, that helps.”

_RICHIE._

“I know, I know,” he mumbles. “We have to keep going, right? Gotta keep sacrificing all these memories I didn’t know I still had stored in me so I can resurrect my dead best friend and we can go about our merry ways.”

Richie hears something like a wave turning over itself, right next to his ear. He supposes this means Maturin is close to him. But the sound makes him strangely nostalgic, taking him back to the first time he stepped onto a beach on the other side of the country. It feels like eons ago.

_THERE ARE SOME MEMORIES YOU CAN RECALL, THOUGH, YES?_ Maturin prods.

The wave is ringing in his ears. Numbly, he reaches back up to his hair. Behind the curve of his ear is something smooth and cold under his fingertips. He pulls it away.

A small, light blue seashell. One he took off of Old Orchard Beach, back when he was two or five or twelve or some age that didn’t really matter. Something he kept until his last year in Derry, where it disappeared before he could pack it.

He used to look at this shell and think to himself that it was a sign that California was calling to him. He remembers being scared to answer that call.

“Eddie,” Richie says slowly, staring at the lip of the shell and tracing his thumb along it’s ragged edges. “He wanted… to come with me.”

_YES._

The rough edge of the shell catches his skin, not deep enough to draw blood but enough to lift the skin. He stares at it for a long, quiet time. He knows what is in this memory. He’s just not sure he’s ready to play it out again.

_But it’s for Eddie,_ his traitorous brain reminds him, and in the end that’s all it takes for him to turn his hand and release the shell into the abyss below.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_1992._

Eddie barged into Richie’s room with enough righteous fury to knock the door right off its hinges. Richie turned in his chair and watched, bemused, as Eddie collapsed onto Richie’s bed with a frustrated yell.

“Rough day, Eddie my love?” he asked, voice saccharine.

“Fuck off,” Eddie retorted. He buried himself underneath Richie’s blankets until only a tuft of his dark hair was visible. Richie turned away so there was no chance of Eddie catching his manic grin. “Ma is all on my case about how I shouldn’t stress so much about the SAT next semester because I’m just gonna go to Eastern Maine.”

Richie scowled at his math homework. “You aren’t going to EMCC, Eds, you wanna go to NYU.”

“It doesn’t matter what I want, it’s what my mom wants,” Eddie snapped. Richie turned back to him, and Eddie unburied himself enough to glare at Richie. “God, she’s just. I can’t go anywhere _but_ Eastern Maine because anywhere else is too far away and then I can’t take care of her, and how could I be so much of a terrible son as to leave my mom helpless by herself? And Eddie-bear, it would save you money to live at home and go to college, and you could get a job at the pharmacy. That nice Greta girl would make an _excellent_ friend, Eddie-bear, do you really want to leave this all behind?!”

By the time he finished, Eddie was sitting halfway up, blankets piled around him and shirt rucked up. His eyes were wild in a way Richie had never seen before. Richie gave him a wicked grin. “She’s _still_ trying to set you up with Greta Keene? Doesn’t she know Greta’s a heinous bitch?”

“That’s not the point, Richie!” Eddie yelled. “Christ, you’re so fucking obtuse sometimes, did you even hear anything else I said?”

“Yeah, your mom sucks and she’s trying to keep you here so the big, bad world doesn’t hurt you, I heard, Eds,” Richie said. He threw a pencil at Eddie and laughed when Eddie batted it away with another yell. “It doesn’t matter. You wanna get out? I’ll get you out.”

His heart stopped beating for a moment.

_Too real, too real, too real,_ Richie thought, and he turned hastily in his chair and reached for another pencil. He wrote over an answer he’d already written down just to look like he was doing something important.

But Eddie’s voice was softer than Richie expected when he said, “Yeah? And where are you going when you get the hell out of here?”

“California,” Richie admitted. He gripped his pencil just a little too tight. The stupid seashell he kept on his desk that was a billion years old seemed to gleam brightly at him. “Across the country, baby. Gonna get my toe in the water and get a job at a radio station out there, and that’ll lead to my amazing breakthrough into comedy.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agreed. His smile was teasing when Richie finally looked at him again. “Gonna be the funny man in all the movies. Can’t be a leading man with a face like that.”

Richie snorted around a startled laugh, and yelled, “ _Hey!_ ” as he threw his pencil at Eddie again. Eddie batted it away with ease and practiced laughter. “Fuck you, all the girls are crawling over me. And when this face is on every goddamn movie poster, you’re gonna regret doubting me.”

“I didn’t doubt you, idiot. I’ve never doubted you.”

And. Fuck. If that hadn’t been everything that Richie had needed to hear. He swallowed thickly around the lump in his throat. “Do you really think I could do it?”

Eddie shrugged, suddenly sheepish. He tugged his shirt down. “I mean, if movies are what you want to do, you’re gonna have to take an acting class or two,” he said honestly. “But yeah, Rich, I think you’re funny as hell. You’d be a great movie star, or whatever.”

“What if it wasn’t movies?” Richie asked. His palms were sweating in a way they only did when he and Eddie curled up together to watch movies. “What if I just wanted to do comedy?”

“What, like stand-up?”

It was Richie’s turn to shrug, faking nonchalance as well as he can. “Yeah.”

It was quiet for more than a few heart-stopping seconds before Richie finally built up the nerve to look Eddie in the eye. Eddie was smiling softly, the last expression Richie had expected to see on his face after the way he’d come into the room. “I think you’d be really good at that, Rich.”

Richie’s shoulders sagged. “Really?” he asked, voice too quiet to be properly hopeful.

“Yes, you idiot, stop fishing for compliments,” Eddie said. He threw a pencil back at Richie and rolled his eyes in annoyance when Richie caught it. “California. Alright. I can start looking up schools there.”

And as quickly as Richie’s body had been warmed by Eddie’s reassurance, it froze over once again. Every muscle in his body was tight as he said, “What?”

Eddie looked at him like he’d grown another head. “California. If I’m gonna go out there with you, I should probably apply to colleges out there, right?”

“You’re going with me?” Richie squeaked.

“You said I could come!” Eddie snapped, defensive suddenly. He grabbed a fistful of the blankets and glared at Richie, but Richie has known him long enough to know there’s no real heat in it.

Richie’s beating heart may as well have been in his hands for what he said next. “You’d really come?”

Eddie’s expression smoothed out, earnest in a rare way that knocked the wind out of Richie every time. “I’d follow you anywhere, Rich. You know that.”

“I didn’t, actually, know that!”

“Shit, asshole, if you don’t want me to come then just say so!” Eddie yelled. “I can just go to fucking Eastern Maine and stay with my mom and never get the hell out of this shithole. I get why you wouldn’t want me tagging along, your freaky little asthmatic friend, but it’s kind of a dickhole move to say it then not mean it, Richie!”

“Eddie, whoa, whoa!” Richie said. He stood up without realizing it and made it across the room before the thought even crossed his mind, barely even realizing he’d picked up the seashell as he’d stood. Eddie blinked at him when he sat down on the bed. “Jesus Christ, okay, first of all, I don’t think of you as my freaky little asthmatic friend, I’m not _that_ big of an asshole. You’re my friend, my best friend, obviously I want you to come with me!”

Eddie scoffed. “Fucking fine, I’ll go with you then!”

“Fine!” Richie said, and he let Eddie glare at him for as long as he could before he grinned from ear to ear. It took a half second for Eddie to start grinning back. Richie reached forward with his cupped hand and waited until Eddie extended his to drop the seashell into his palm. “A promise ring, Eddie my love, now that we just made a commitment to run away together.”

“You’re such an asshole!” Eddie said around a laugh. “I fucking hate you.”

“Then why are you going to _California_ with me, Eds? I think it’s about time you admit to yourself that you’re in love with me. It’s okay, I get it, who wouldn’t fall for all of this?”

He was still laughing even as Eddie lunged across the bed and tackled him to the floor.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


For a split second, Richie can almost feel the way it felt to have Eddie’s arms around him again. He reaches forward, chasing the sensation, before he remembers where he is and realizes he’s reaching for a ghost. His arm falls numbly back to his side.

“He didn’t come with me,” he says, even though it’s pretty a fucking obvious thing to say.

_I KNOW._

“I wish he would have,” Richie says miserably.

_IT WILL HELP TO KNOW THAT HE WISHED THE SAME THING._

Richie laughs wetly. He couldn’t describe the emotions rattling in his chest if someone put a gun to his head right now. Maybe he’ll never be able to describe them again. “I guess that does help. Thanks.”

It’s quiet, for a while, and for some inexplicable reason Richie is struck with the need to fill the quiet. He tucks his hands in his pockets. “I mean, he was my best friend, you know?” Richie says. “Him and Stan. All of them, really, but it was. It was Eddie first. And Stanley just… _understood_ me, I guess. In this quiet way that no one else did. But Eddie was my best friend way before I ever even fell in love with him.”

_IT IS A GREAT LOVE STORY._

“It would be,” Richie agrees. His mouth feels strange without the default to humor. “If he’d felt the same, you know? Would have been one hell of a love story.”

_YOU SEEM CERTAIN HE DID NOT FEEL THE SAME WAY,_ Maturin states.

“I think it’s too much to hope differently,” Richie said honestly. “Also, it, like… Makes me really fucking sad. If both of us felt that way and didn’t, y’know. Get a chance. Do anything about it. Ended up as sad, miserable and lonely old fucks.”

Maturin hums.

“He did always say that I was his best friend, though,” Richie continues on, uncertain why he feels like the words are bursting to get out of his throat. “He’d say it a lot when we were younger. He called me his ‘best best’ so often that little Georgie Denbrough caught onto it and used it for Billy.”

Richie blinks in surprise. He hadn’t even remembered that until he’d started talking, but now, as he says it, he can see it clear as day. The first time Eddie ever said it and every time after, always followed by a shy, _don’t tell the others, okay, I don’t want to hurt their feelings._ Richie can see it so tangibly he’s certain he could touch it if he reached forward and tried.

So he reaches again, and this time he doesn’t feel like he’s chasing a ghost.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_1984._

“Eddie, Eddie, look at what my dad gave me!”

Richie practically fell off his bike in his excitement to get to Eddie’s house, but Eddie was already bounding down the steps to meet him. Richie waved his present proudly in the air. “Dad gave me ten whole dollars, Eds!”

“Just for the arcade?” Eddie asked wonderingly. He took the money out of Richie’s hands and looked at it with wide-eyed wonder. “Oh my god. Do you even know how many games this would get us?”

“Forty,” Richie said proudly. “Forty!”

Excitedly, Eddie started around the yard to grab his own bike, ready to take off towards the arcade. “Well, what are we waiting for, let’s go!”

Richie had to scramble to get back on his bike. Eddie already took off. “Hey, wait!” he called. “Eds! Should we invite Billy? Or, or, Stanley?”

Eddie slowed down just enough for Richie to catch up. “We can,” he said slowly. “But also we could go just the two of us. Would that be okay?”

“You wanna go just the two of us?” Richie repeated, confused. “Why?”

And it was cute, cute, _cute,_ how Eddie’s cheeks went red like they would when they were at recess and he was trying to show Richie he could run faster than him. “Cause maybe I just wanna hang out with you, not everyone,” Eddie said, all in one big exhale of breath. “Billy and Stanley are my friends, our best friends, but you’re my best best friend. You know?”

Richie’s throat was tight, the same way it got sometimes before he started to cry. His whole body felt warm in a summery way. “Really?” he asked. A huge grin split across his face.

Eddie still looked shy. “Yeah. Is that okay?”

“That I’m your best best friend?” Richie asked. “Is it okay? _Yeah,_ Eddie-Spaghetti, it’s super duper okay. You’re my best best friend, too.”

Eddie grinned too, the best thing that Richie had ever seen. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


There’s a weight on his chest when he realizes he’s back in the abyss. It’s a restrictive thing that feels like it’s got a hand around his lungs. He can’t get the image of Eddie’s young and earnest face out of his mind.

Richie had thought that was going to be the greatest moment of his life, eight years old and hearing Eddie call them best friends. He had thought that he’d never feel happier than he did at that moment.

There was a power behind it then, something Richie can realize now at forty years old, because his world had been so limited when he was eight and it had seemed so big and terrifying but Richie had felt safer knowing his best friend would be at his side.

The world is still big and scary and it feels emptier than Richie can comprehend right now, but somewhere in time over thirty years ago a little kid is telling his dorky friend in the coke-bottle glasses that their friendship is forever and it’s a promise that will ring true even when they aren’t together.

“You never stop to think about how powerful it is,” Richie says. “Friendship. Because it fuckin’ is. Everyone always wants to talk about love and that’s all fine and dandy but no one ever thinks about how they couldn’t get wherever the fuck they were going unless they had their friends by their side.”

_YOU UNDERSTOOD THAT AT A VERY YOUNG AGE,_ Maturin hums.

“I think I gave myself no choice but to understand it,” Richie admits. “I think I was aware, even back then, I might not get any other kind of love.”

Maturin’s low and rumbly laugh fills the space again. _YOU WERE LOVED._

Richie nods. “I lucked out by meeting all of those losers. I wish I’d had more time with all of them. I’m just glad going forward that we’ll all be in each other’s lives. Fuck, I think I’d die without them again.”

_NO,_ Maturin disagrees. _THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT. YES, YOUR FRIENDS LOVE YOU. AND THEY WILL CONTINUE TO. BUT YOU RECEIVED ANOTHER KIND OF LOVE AS WELL. YOU SIMPLY NEVER SAW IT._

“Hard to see something that’s not there.”

There’s a tension in the air that is new to this place. Richie’s knees lock in place.

_DO YOU THINK THIS WOULD WORK IF YOU WERE NOT LOVED, RICHIE?_ Maturin asks. _CAN YOU TRULY BELIEVE THIS RITUAL WOULD BRING HIM BACK IF YOUR LOVE HAD NEVER BEEN RETURNED?_

Richie’s heart is pounding so hard he can feel it in his toes. He’s trembling, cold for the first time since coming to this place. His mouth feels dry. “It doesn’t matter whether he did or didn’t,” Richie says resolutely. “I loved him enough. I _love_ him enough to bring him back.”

_YOU CAN FEEL IT, CAN’T YOU?_ Maturin goes on. _HOW THE AIR IS CHANGING? HOW WE ARE ANTICIPATING HIS ARRIVAL.THE SPACE MUST CHANGE TO ACCOMMODATE HIM. YOU MUST CHANGE TO ACCOMMODATE HIM._

“Does this mean I’m done?” Richie asks brokenly. “Have I given enough?”

_NO._

Richie falls to his knees.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_1991._

“You know, you’ve always been an asshole, but this is pretty next level,” Eddie said. His voice should have been drowned out by the rain, should have been _impossible_ to hear, but Richie was so fine-tuned to everything Eddie that he heard it as clear as a homing beacon.

They were both soaked, too, within a matter of seconds, cold layers of clothes clinging to their skin. The rain fogged up Richie’s glasses.

“I don’t understand what you’re so fucking mad about!” Richie snapped. “Eddie, I fucking. What do you want from me? You get mad when I hang around you all the time, you get mad when I’m not there, you get mad when I sit next to you at movie night, you get mad when I follow you out into the fucking rain—”

Eddie scoffed, so loud and disbelieving that Richie cuts off in the middle of his sentence. “You can’t be fucking serious, Richie! I haven’t fucking seen you in, like, a week because you keep blowing me off, but the second it’s a group hang-out you’re all over it. And it’s fucking bullshit.”

“Last week you got mad at me for hanging around you too much,” Richie reminded him angrily. He yanked his glasses off his face and wiped them uselessly against his shirt, glaring at the Eddie-shaped blob in front of him. “Guess that was just a show for Mary though, right? Act like you don’t want to spend as much time around me so you can keep flirting with her?”

“What the _fuck_ are you talking about?”

Richie shoved his glasses back on. “Mary Harper! She’s been flirting with you all semester, Eds, I’ve fucking seen it, and once you realized it you started flirting back so why give me the time of day when a pretty girl is right fucking there instead, right?”

“You’re the one who gives me shit for not going out on dates!” Eddie yelled. “You’re the one who always says you’re drowning in pussy, and it’s about time the rest of us get some action, too. Unless it’s all been a fucking lie?”

“Of course it’s a fucking lie. Are you shitting me, dude? Have you ever seen a girl even _talk_ to me? Jesus Christ, when would I even have the time—I’m always with _you,_ but you made it perfectly clear last week that you didn’t want me to hang off your arm so goddamn much. It’s a little hypocritical for you to want that now, man.”

Eddie let out a sharp yell and tugged on his hair, already starting to curl in the rain. “God, Rich, sometimes you’re so fucking stupid I literally can’t believe it.”

Richie throws his hands up. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t want Mary Harper, you idiot!”

“Then what _do_ you want?”

“I want you to stop coming and going whenever the fuck you feel like it!” Eddie cried out. His voice broke in the middle of the sentence. Had Richie not known him for practically their entire lives, for ten _years,_ he might not have been able to distinguish the difference between the rain on Eddie’s face and the tears. “You can’t just pick and choose to be a part of my life, Richie! I’m, I’m— _fuck,_ I’m so scared that one day you’re gonna wake up and not want to hang around me anymore and all you’ve been doing recently is growing fucking distant!”

Richie’s eyes were full of his own tears. “I’m not trying to move on from _you,_ Eds, I’m just. I’m trying to move _on._ All our friends are leaving, or haven’t you noticed? First Bev, then Bill. Ben’s moving next month, and you fucking know the Uris’s are talking about leaving before Stan starts his senior year. Christ, Eddie, everything we know is walking away and I’m fucking terrified, okay? What am I gonna do when you go, too?”

Eddie stared at him, drenched to the bone, eyes wide and disbelieving. His voice was small, almost broken, as he said, “You can’t move on from me just yet. I’m still here, Richie, you can’t. You can’t move on from me when I’m still fucking here.”

Richie swallowed around the lump in his throat. “I’m not trying to, Eds, I swear to god, but I can’t figure out what the hell you want from me.”

“I want to be your friend, Richie.”

And hell, if that wasn’t the hook, line, and sinker. Richie wanted that, too, but he wanted a lot of things that he didn’t allow himself to have. Richie didn’t know how long he’d been in love with Eds, and he probably couldn’t even guess a number if someone held a gun to his head, but this was the root of the problem, wasn’t it? Eddie wanted to be friends. Richie wanted…

Well. He supposed it didn’t matter what he wanted.

“We are friends,” Richie said. “I’m standing in the fucking pouring rain trying to convince you to stop being mad at me. You went to Bangor with my family last summer. We have sleepovers, we share comics, we hang out, Eddie, we _are_ friends. But you gotta start acting like one, too.”

“And what does _that_ mean?” Eddie demanded.

Richie started to step back, back towards the house where Stan and Ben and Mike still were, waiting for them to return. Back to a warm home and good friends and a movie they’d all probably seen more times than they could count. “If I can’t pick and choose when to come into your life, you can’t pick and choose when to tell me to go. I can’t keep trying with you just to get a slap on the wrist whenever I come around. I’m going back inside..”

He tried to turn and walk away, but his foot slipped against the wet gravel and he tumbled forward, just barely catching himself on his palms and his knees. He swore loudly at the stings of pain.

“Richie, holy shit—”

But Richie flinched away before Eddie could touch him, before Eddie could help him stand up. He stood by himself, picking himself off the ground and dusting himself off, dislodging loose gravel from his palms and knees. “I’m fine,” he said. He barely glanced back at Eddie before he started walking again. “I’ll see you inside if you decide to stay.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Fuck,” Richie gasps. He is still on his knees. The memory presses down on his chest. He can feel it in his blood, now, how violently he had loved Eddie when they were younger. How much it had eaten him alive. Even after reliving it, he can barely remember what it was like to be fifteen and stoned and secretly in love with your best friend; but there are intrinsic parts that come with loving someone for as long as you’ve been alive, and he clings to it. He remembers how it feels.

Hell, if he had the time, he could sit down and connect the strings of this feeling to every moment of the last twenty-odd years when he’d felt an emotion he couldn’t name at the time. This was the core of it, even separated by miles and miles and bullshit clown magic. Eddie had always been the core of it.

_YOU LOVED HIM A GREAT DEAL,_ Maturin states.

Richie laughs humorlessly. “You caught me,” he says, raising his hands in mock surrender. “I was over the moon or whatever other shitty cliche you want to apply. He gave me something to live for.”

_YOU GAVE HIM THE SAME THING._

“Yeah, well,” Richie mutters. “That’s easy for you to say.”

_IT IS. I AM OMNISCIENT._

Richie snorts around a startled cackle. It bursts out of him before he even registers it. “Man, if you were a corporeal person, you’d have a hell of a stand-up career ahead of you. Your comedic timing is golden.”

_I WILL CONSIDER IT FOR MY FUTURE ENDEAVORS._

“I remember being so mad at him then,” Richie recalls. He can’t shake the memory of the fight now that he’s seen it again. He can feel the remnants of his rain-soaked clothes from that night clinging to his skin. “And seriously, I think at first I had no reason to be besides him flirting with a girl. He probably wasn’t even flirting. But then it just escalated… I didn’t mean to yell at him like that.”

_YOU CAN LOVE SOMEONE AND BE UPSET WITH THEM,_ Maturin reminds him, because Maturin is apparently more emotionally adjusted than Richie’s ever been.

“I wasn’t really mad,” Richie admits. “Just fucking… bummed.”

_AND NOW? ARE YOU UPSET WITH HIM NOW?_

Richie startles. “Am I what?”

_YOU CARRY IT ON YOUR SHOULDERS,_ Maturin says. _I CAN SEE IT WEIGHING YOU DOWN. YOU MUST BE ABLE TO FEEL IT. SO I ASK AGAIN. ARE YOU UPSET WITH HIM NOW?_

“What am I carrying on my shoulders?” Richie asks.

_YOU CAN TAKE IT AND GIVE IT TO ME, IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW. I THINK YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT IT IS._

“I think I’m on significant amounts of cocaine,” Richie mutters. “This is a trip and a half. Fine. You want whatever weight is on my shoulders? I give it to you. I probably don’t want to keep it anyway.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_2016._

“I fucked your mother,” Eddie said, around a laugh and a glob of blood that fell from his mouth. There was a gaping hole in his chest and if Richie could, he’d put his own heart in there to seal the hole and heal him. 

“You just gotta keep holding on, Eds,” Richie babbled, pressing his hands to Eddie’s chest and doing his best to keep Eddie’s eyes on him. “See, look? Everyone’s killin’ that fucking clown. So you just gotta hold on til they’re done then we’ll get you out of here, right?”

Eddie didn’t speak but he nodded his head like he understood, like he was gonna try his damnedest, like he wanted to live just as badly as Richie wanted him to live. Richie touched his cheek again, unable to help it. They were covered in grime and dirt and blood and water but Eddie still leaned into his touch.

“Richie!” Mike yelled, drawing both of their gazes to where the climax of the battle was happening. And it was _happening,_ they were _winning,_ that clown was getting smaller and smaller with each insult but they needed everyone for the grand finale.

Richie looked back at Eddie. “I don’t wanna leave you here alone, bud.”

But Eddie shook his head and shoved at Richie’s shoulder. He opened his mouth to speak but started coughing before any words could come out. Christ, he was really gonna bleed out if they didn’t wrap this up, and Richie didn’t want to _leave_ him but this had to _end_ if they would have any chance of saving him.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Richie pleaded, broken and terrified but ready to end all of this. Ready if it meant saving Eddie, ready if it meant climbing out of this hellhole with his six best friends and a chance to live a better life. Eddie laughed weakly, like Richie had made a joke, but Richie meant it. Don’t _go_ anywhere, Eds.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


For the first time, Richie pulls himself out of the memory. He doesn’t remember standing but he stumbles backwards now, unable to catch himself. He feels an unbearable anguish; he didn’t think it could be worse than living in a world without Eddie. There’s a reverberating sound in the abyss that he faintly recognizes as his own screams.

“Not that one,” he shrieks, voice muffled by the sobs that rack his body. “Please. Eddie. _Eddie._ I can’t _do_ that one again—”

_THAT IS WHY IT IS A SACRIFICE._

“Please,” Richie begs. He can’t bring himself to raise his head. He’s ashamed, angry at himself that he can’t go forward with this. This is what brings Eddie _back_ —Eddie, who was braver than Richie ever deserved—and Richie can’t even get through it enough for it to _matter._

_IT IS THE WAY._

Richie’s hands shake. “I _know!_ ” he snaps. “I know it’s the way!”

Maturin is quiet for a long while. _ANGER IS NOT THE WAY TO GET BACK AT ME, RICHIE. I AM AFRAID THERE IS NOT MUCH THAT YOU CAN DO THAT WOULD HURT ME. IT IS BEST JUST TO MOVE FORWARD._

“Can I have a fucking second to catch my breath?”

_WE DO HAVE TIME,_ Maturin allows. His hum fills the space again.

Richie is trembling so hard he can practically feel it in his bones. There’s a coldness spreading in his blood that he doesn’t think he’ll ever be warm again. He gets it now, why Maturin had called this a sacrifice. Why he was giving his memories instead of having them taken. He wasn’t losing these, not again. No, instead, he was giving them up by bringing them to the surface and now he will carry them in the palms of his hands until the day he dies. Every last one of them.

“I didn’t save him,” Richie chokes out.

_YOU ARE DOING WHAT YOU CAN TO SAVE HIM NOW._

“How much more do I have to give?” Richie asks. He’s not sure he’s ready to hear the answer.

_HOW MUCH MORE ARE YOU WILLING TO GIVE UP?_

There’s a pain, sharp and hot in his ribs. Richie gasps around it and presses his hand there. It’s warm to the touch.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he hisses.

_YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KNOW THE ANSWER. YOU WILL KNOW WHEN IT IS ENOUGH._

The pain twists inside of him and Richie grits his teeth. “There’s one,” he says, every word he says coming out in one quick exhale of breath. “There’s one in my ribs. I can feel it, it—it’s trying to get out.”

Maturin makes an affirming sound. _THEN YOU HAVE GIVEN IT,_ Maturin says, and that’s all the warning Richie gets before he’s knocked off his balance and falls into the next memory slowly.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_1994._

Richie was in the middle of loading his last box into the back of his dad’s car when he heard the telltale sounds of Eddie biking up the street as fast as he could.

“You were just gonna leave and not even come to say goodbye?” Eddie snapped, dropping his bike unceremoniously on the ground and storming over to where Richie stood, still trying to force the box in the cramped space. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Have we not been friends for the past, like, twelve years? Fucking seriously?”

Richie huffed as he finally wedged the box into place. He straightened and dusted off his hands. “Well, hello to you too, Edward, lovely to see you again on this bright and sunny day. Why, I’m doing just fine all things considered, how are you?”

“Shut the fuck up, you were just gonna leave!” Eddie yelled, his voice bordering on hysterical and rising in volume and octave. To Richie’s horror, there were tears filling in Eddie’s eyes. “I was waiting! Me and, and, and Mike, we were waiting at my house! We thought you’d stop by before school was supposed to start so we could say goodbye, it’s just. It’s _just us_ left, Richie, it’s just the three of us and you’re fucking leaving and—were you even gonna say goodbye?”

Eddie’s voice broke on the last word, and that’s all it took for him to crumple in on himself and start crying, for real.

“Jesus fuck on a stick,” Richie yelped, lunging forward and tugging Eddie into his arms. “Eddie, Eds, man, what the fuck?”

“You have to say goodbye, Richie, you promised!” Eddie gasped out. He grabbed a fistful of Richie’s jacket and held on for dear life, clinging to the space right next to Richie’s rib.

Richie’s heart was in his throat, impossible to swallow around. He had no way to admit to Eddie that the thought of leaving today was enough to make him feel like he was clawing out of his skin. That the idea of saying goodbye to Eddie and Mike, the only two Losers who remained in Derry after just five short years, made him want to melt into the floor and get all over their shoes so he’d never really have to leave them. But it had been selfish, he realized now, to not want to say goodbye. To not want to have this in his memory for as long as he could. Eddie still talked about joining him in California once he graduated from Derry High in just a few months, but who could say for sure that it would happen? He’d gotten into NYU, and that had been his dream. Long before he promised Richie over a year ago that he’d follow him to California if he could.

“I’m sorry, fuck, Eds, I’m so sorry,” Richie said. He clung a little bit tighter, too. “Jesus. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I don’t know _how,_ dude.”

“You can’t just not say goodbye,” Eddie cried into Richie’s shoulder. Richie’s arms around him didn’t feel like enough.

There were tears in Richie’s eyes, too, and he lifted his head to the sky to try and stop them from falling. His heart was breaking in his chest, breaking all over his hands, crumbling to dust, and he couldn’t do anything about it. “I don’t wanna go,” he admitted.

Eddie laughed wetly, the sound of it muffled from where he was pressed into Richie’s jacket. “It’s California, that’s been your dream forever.”

“Yeah, but _after_ we graduated,” Richie said. “Or. I don’t know. It’s not… it was supposed to be with _you,_ Eds.”

“Don’t,” Eddie whispered. He lifted his head so he could bury it in Richie’s neck. He was still crying and Richie felt helpless to stop it. “Please don’t, Richie, it’s. Won’t that make it harder? Saying goodbye?”

“I’m sorry,” Richie said again. He pressed his nose into Eddie’s hair, knowing it may very well be his last chance to for a while. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

Eddie hiccuped around another sob. “I’m coming after you,” he promised, and his grip against Richie was like a branding iron. “I swear, Richie, the second I graduate I. I’ll. I need a car but I’ll buy one, okay? And I’ll drive out to California and we’re. We’ll. I _swear,_ Richie.”

“I believe you,” Richie told him. “I do. I believe you.”

He could have sat there for hours, holding Eddie in his arms and apologizing and praying to whatever the fuck would listen that he’d get a chance to do it again, and he probably would have if Mike hadn’t made his way over to the house and shyly asked if he could get a hug, too. It was hard leaving Eddie, of course it was, but it was seeing Mike that really tipped Richie over the edge. The most steady of their friends, the most reliable. The one who, as of what he told them last week, was staying in Derry to take care of the farm.

Mike laughed wetly when Richie burst into a new round of tears, but he was crying too when he pulled Richie in for a hug. “I’m gonna miss you, Trashmouth,” Mike told him, sincere and steady as always. Richie planted a fat, wet kiss on Mike’s cheek.

“Oh, baby, you know I’ll miss you the most,” he drawled. He squeezed Mike’s biceps as he pulled away.

And they stayed, of course they did, while Richie’s parents loaded up the last of their stuff. They stayed when Richie’s dad got behind the wheel of the moving truck and they waved him off. They stayed even after Richie pulled them both into one last frantic hug, clinging to the childish belief that he won’t forget what they feel like, what they look like, who they are. They stayed when Richie folded himself into the front seat of his dad’s truck, where his mom sat in the driver’s seat waiting for him, and they stayed even as that shitty old thing drove the Toziers further and further down the street.

Richie stared at the shrinking image of them, his friends, the only ones left, until he couldn’t anymore. Then he closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair and pressed his hands to his stomach and thought to himself, _I’ll see ya real soon, Eds. Just like we promised._

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


He’s sobbing, body-racking, noisy, echoing sobs, when he’s pulled out of this memory. Sobs that make him want to curl into himself and shut the whole world out. Sobs that he’ll feel for days afterwards.

Some memories, he thinks painfully, are better left in the past.

“But that’s the point, isn’t it?” Richie sobs, words muffled with tears. “To give you the ones I wish I never had to remember.”

_A SACRIFICE. YES._

“Fuck,” he gasps. “It’s all… It’s coming back to me, you know? Things I’d tried my fucking hardest to remember. Things I wanted to forget. Leaving him—shit, _leaving him_ in Maine while I went to California, it… it fucking sucked. And I got accepted to a few colleges out of California but I could never explain to anyone why I had to stay in state. It was because of him, wasn't it? Because even if I forgot, the promise I made to him, it was. It was engraved in my bones.”

_YES,_ Maturin agreed. _IT WAS AN OATH. AS BINDING AS THE CUT ON YOUR HAND THAT TIED YOU TO YOUR FRIENDS._

Richie chokes out another cry. He hates that all he can think about is how things might have been different if Eddie had just come with him back then. How they would have graduated together like they always planned, gone to college together. Rented a shitty apartment in the city together. Eddie would have come to his first show. Richie would have bought him a tie on his first day at his new job. They might have even had a chance to fall in love, for reals, in a way a person only can when they’ve known someone for their entire life. Richie might have known the feeling of Eddie’s mouth pressing against his softly.

Richie covers his mouth to try and stifle his sob, but it does him no good. It breaks out of him unwarranted regardless. He doesn’t even get a warning, then, as his sharp exhale of breath solidifies in the air, like exhaling on a cold winter’s day, and sinks below him.

“Wait,” he says quickly, though he knows there’s no stopping it. “Wait, I’m not ready, I just need another minute—”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_2016._

It had been coming back to him in bits and pieces, memories of this place. Derry, his friends, his childhood. Nothing concrete that he felt like he could truly grasp. Then he saw Beverly and Ben outside the restaurant and the weight of the love he had for those two people settled against him like a blanket, centering him after spending so many years adrift.

The rest of it nearly bowled him over, everything coming back to him the second he laid eyes on Eddie again. Christ, his brain was rushing through image after image, trying to reconcile the same bratty kid and hyper teenager Richie had once known with this new image, clean and pressed and tentatively smiling. And of course it had been Eddie, of course he knew the second Richie laid eyes on him again, because that had always been it, hadn’t it? It had always been Eddie, even after all these years. It’s why he hadn’t let any relationship work out, it’s why he always felt like a part of him was missing. There _was_ something missing, and it was these people, his friends gathered around in this room, but it was also _Eddie_ in spades, every facet of him and every version Richie had thought he’d known. It was Eddie.

“This meeting of the Losers Club has officially begun,” Richie said, after making his entrance and banging on the gong to get everyone’s eyes on him. Sure enough, Eddie looked at him and it was like his entire world was realigning. Richie’s heart was reverberating around the room.

“Hey, look at these guys,” Eddie said with a laugh and a small point, still awkward even after all these years.

It was overwhelming, then, the immensity of his love for a person he hadn’t seen in twenty-two years. Richie could feel it in his lungs, could feel it in the way it was easier to draw a breath right now than it had been for the last few years of his life. He had always blamed it on the cigarettes he had smoked in his twenties and, now he realizes, throughout his teen years, but the simple truth of the matter is that one of his lungs must have been waiting for Eddie to come back because it was so _easy._ Easy to fall back in love. Easy to remember he _was_ in love, easy to want, easy to hope, easy to breathe. Richie could feel it in his fingertips.

Richie sat next to Bev, maybe for self-preservation, but it was worse in a lot of ways because it meant that Eddie was across from him, right in his line of sight, beautifully illuminated by the shitty lighting in the restaurant. Richie could spend the whole night looking at Eddie and no one would even think anything of it.

It was easy, of course it was, to fall back into familiar habits of teasing and pushing buttons and hiding behind smiles, which meant it was easy, of course, for Richie to barrel on through with a joke the second he found out Eddie had gotten _married,_ Jesus Christ. It was too much to think about, how when he was thirteen and sixteen and eighteen he had more of Eddie than he’ll ever have now. A conflict between what he still wanted even after all this time, _god,_ and what he knew he can’t have. 

And, well, that had always been the case, hadn’t it? Even when he was a teenager who was ass over tits for his best friend, he had known he’d only get pieces of Eddie. Whatever part Eddie had been willing to share, right up until he met someone and moved on and lived the life everyone expected of him. Nice house, someone to come home to each night, a regular old nine-to-five, vegetables on the dinner plate every night kind of life. Richie couldn’t have that with Eddie even if he wished it so hard it sent him back in time.

But hell, what did it matter? It came back to him easily, hadn’t it? Loving Eddie was as easy as breathing. And it had been over twenty years but Richie knew he’d still take what he could get.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


“Please,” Richie gasps, stumbling out again on his own accord and curling in on himself as he sucks in desperate breath after breath. “Please, I can’t fucking—I can’t _do this_ anymore, please. I can’t… I can’t fucking _breathe,_ I can’t keep seeing him. He’s gone, he’s gone, I can’t—”

_YOU ARE ALMOST DONE, RICHIE,_ Maturin promises him. _YOU CAN FEEL IT, CAN’T YOU? THE WAY THE SPACE AROUND YOU IS ANTICIPATING WHAT IS YET TO COME._

“I don’t have anything left to give!” Richie yells. He bangs his hands on a floor he can’t see and screams, letting the sound echo in the space below. “There’s nothing left, I only—I missed out on twenty-seven _years,_ I only have what I’ve given, there’s nothing left. I have nothing left.”

_YOU KNOW THAT ISN’T THE TRUTH._

“I don’t know what else I have!” Richie cries brokenly. “I fucking—I lost it all, man! I drove away from it, you fucking watched! And I walked away from it again, and the fucking—the last thing I said to him was _don’t go anywhere!_ I should have—he _deserved._ He deserved so much more from me and now I have nothing left. I should have told him.”

_YOU TOLD HIM ONCE,_ Maturin says, with his infinite patience and gentle prodding. _IT IS THERE WITHIN YOU. DO YOU KNOW WHERE IT IS?_

“No,” he whispers. “No, I never. I never told him.”

_ONCE. YOU SAID IT ONCE._

He’s still hyperventilating, still crying, still down on all fours on a floor that doesn’t exist. He is broken but there is something trying frantically to glue him back together. Richie lifts a shaking hand and reaches into his mouth until he finds the words that had always been buried so deeply inside of him.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_1993._

“You’re so heavy, can you _try_ to hold yourself upright?”

Richie slung his arm around Eddie’s shoulder and pulled him impossibly closer, an impossible feat considering they were already plastered against each other in an attempt to make it down the street. “Why would I when I got your shoulder to lean on, baby?” Richie drawled. He pressed a wet kiss to the top of Eddie’s head and cackled loudly when Eddie pinched his side.

“Shh, _shh,_ Richie,” Eddie hissed, but he was laughing too. His laughter inflated Richie’s chest like a balloon. For some reason, the thought was terribly funny to Richie, and he stopped them both in their tracks as he tried to explain it to Eds.

“It’s like, it’s like,” he babbled, tripping over his words just as badly as he was stumbling over his feet. He laughed again, too loud and right in Eddie’s ear. “Like the fucking… a _balloon,_ Eddie!”

Eddie’s giggles were the brightest part of the night. Fuck the streetlights, Richie didn’t need it when he had Eddie’s laughter guiding him home.

“You’re so drunk, Rich.”

“No, you.”

Eddie’s hand was so warm, igniting Richie’s entire body starting at the spot his pinky brushed against Richie’s hip where Richie’s shirt had ridden up. “Excellent observation, Deputy,” Eddie said. “We’re _both_ drunk. How ‘bout that?”

Richie hummed. Unconsciously he tried to lean into Eddie’s touch on his hips, chasing that heat. “Okay, we’re both drunk.”

Eddie giggled again, then laughed harder when he hiccuped.

“Hey, that’s my house!” Richie said suddenly, pointing forward with enough force that it almost caused both of them to go tumbling. Eddie’s arms around him tightened. “We made it.”

“Barely,” Eddie muttered. “C’mon, we gotta get inside.”

“Wait, no.” Richie came to a stop and pulled Eddie with him. He had a pressing thought on his mind, one dying to come out of his mouth, and Richie had to say it _right then_ or he might die. “Wait. Eds. I gotta tell you something, s’really important.”

Eddie grunted, trying unsuccessfully to tug himself out from underneath Richie’s arm. “You have to tell me right now?”

“Yes, duh.”

“We’re in the middle of the street.”

Impatiently, Richie huffed. He let go of Eddie long enough to put both of his arms on Eddie’s shoulders. It was the most important thing he would ever say, or so he was convinced, and he needed Eddie to look at him as he said it. “I’ve never said this before,” Richie said seriously.

“Christ, Richie, are you dying? You’re freaking me out.”

Richie shook his head. It was important that Eddie _understand._ Richie couldn’t keep doing this if he didn’t understand. “I’m not dying,” he promised. He tilted his head to the side and almost fell over when the whole world shifted with it. “Fuck. I _might_ be dying. But no, wait. No. I just have something important to tell you.”

Eddie’s brow furrowed. “Okay, Richie, what?”

“It’s _really_ important, Eddie-Spaghetti,” Richie insisted.

“I believe you, oh my god, what is it?”

Richie’s eyes darted across Eddie’s face, memorizing as much of it as he could. He felt like he was running out of time. It started with Bev, but it had only gotten worse since Bill and Ben left and now Stanley announced his family was leaving too and all too well it was dwelling on Richie that this couldn’t last forever. He hadn’t wanted it to, he was ready for the next part of his life before he even understood what that meant, but moving on meant losing nights like _this._

The words are heavy on his tongue. “I’ve never said it out loud before, so you gotta believe me.”

Eddie gripped both of Richie’s wrists with his own hands. “Oh my god, _what_ is it?”

It was possibly, entirely so, that they were both too drunk to remember this properly when the morning came. Richie, desperate and a little bit heartbroken, wanted to kiss Eddie so badly he could feel it in every atom.

He barely remembered what life was like before Eddie, but the lives they built around each other were woven intricately with the strands of Richie’s love and he clung to that. Maybe he couldn’t remember the exact moment he realized he was in love with Eddie Kaspbrak but he’ll remember this moment, when he realized he’d never love anyone like this again, and maybe it’s all the same. There might not be a decisive beginning and end for them but all Richie could hope for in that moment is that they’d get a whole lot of middle.

“I love you,” Richie said seriously, and he sagged forward until he was leaning up against Eddie.

Breathless and indignant, Eddie shoved at Richie’s torso and laughed and somehow manhandled him until they were both upright again. “You’ve said that before, you idiot!” He put his hand in Richie’s back pocket to steady him and lead him forward.

“No, I _love_ you,” Richie insisted. “Really, really, Eds. You’re my f—you’re my _best friend_ and I love you, and—”

Eddie huffed around a laugh and took another step forward, Richie staggering alongside him. “Fine, fine, you freak,” he said. “I love you, too. You’re my best friend, Richie, of course I love you.”

Richie’s chest felt like it was going to burst. “Yeah, but I mean it.”

Eddie looked up at him, brows pinched and mouth turned and still somehow the best thing Richie had ever laid eyes on. “I mean it, too.”

“You do?” Richie asked, voice small.

“Yeah.”

“Eddie?”

Eddie’s shoulders sagged with another sigh, but he still turned back to look at Richie again. He always turned back. Richie could always count on that. “Yeah, Rich.”

Richie gave him a goofy, drunk-happy grin. “Say it again in the morning?”

Eddie laughed and shook his head, but he pulled Richie forward again and his voice was soft when he promised, “Yeah, fine, I’ll say it again in the morning,” and the words still clinging on Richie’s tongue felt less like a death sentence and more like a new beginning.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s different, this time, when he comes back to himself. The memory fades softly. It lingers in his peripheral vision and against his sternum. It’s the calmest he’s felt since starting this, even though in a lot of ways that memory had been the hardest to give up. Something he had barely remembered but had hoped was real and not a dream. Something Eddie had forgotten, most likely, since neither of them ever spoke of it again.

“Can I ask you something, big guy?” Richie asks, scrubbing tiredly at his eyes. “Did Eddie remember that?”

He doesn’t get a response right away, though he doesn’t find it out of the ordinary. He’s used to the long and drawn out silences by this point. What’s a few more minutes in an endless void?

“I was waiting for him to say something,” Richie admits. “The next morning. I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready to bring it up myself, I needed it to come from him to feel. Real, I guess. So I wouldn’t think I was making it up.”

There’s still quiet in the abyss.

Richie furrows his brow. “Maturin?” he tries.

It dawns on him, then, that the impression of the wave is gone. There are no longer flickers of light cutting through the black water. And where he could sense the presence of something larger than him before, there is only emptiness now.

“No,” Richie chokes out. Terror claws inside his ribcage. He whirls around, hoping to catch a glimpse of Maturin, though Richie realizes now he’d never seen the being in the first place. His lungs are going to give out. “No, _fuck,_ no—”

But there isn’t a response. Richie is alone.

“Fuck, _no!_ I wasn’t done, I—I can give more, I can’t. I can’t leave here without him, _fuck!_ Please, let me go again, I can. I have to. I have to bring him back. _Please_ —”

His first hunch upon arriving here must have been correct, because one second he’s fine but the next water is filling his mouth and choking him. Frantically, he snaps his jaw closed. Instinct kicks in and he starts to swim up, up, up, even though he’s not sure he’s going the right way. He can’t see anything in the darkness and every second that passes feels more and more like he’s drowning but he keeps moving his arms anyway. He keeps kicking his feet anyway. The terrible, horrible, broken part of him that wants to stop and let himself sink to the bottom of the floor has been overtaken by an overwhelming and desperate need to make it back to the surface.

Richie thinks he’s crying, and he has the half-hysterical wonder if that’s even possible where he is. If he really is underwater. But he can feel his chest heaving with the sobs he won’t allow himself to take, too terrified that another breath will fill his lungs with water and keep him down here forever. There may be a few fates that are worse than death but Richie can’t stand to stick around and find out.

He can’t even tell if he’s moving, all he knows is that he _has_ to keep moving, keep hoping that things are changing, keep wishing that when he gets to wherever he’s going that he gets a second chance. There is something broken inside of him that fears he just lived through all of that for nothing. There is something hateful inside of him that wonders if this whole thing had been a trick, another fucking manifestation of the clown coming back to screw him over one last time.

He can’t let that be true. He can’t even entertain the idea of it.

Whatever it is inside of him that demands he fight his way to the surface is rattling an ungodly rhythm in tandem to the beating of his heart. Richie feels more frantic than he can remember feeling for a long time. He’s not sure he’s ever felt this determined to live.

After a hundred years or sixty seconds or somewhere in between, his fingers breach the surface of the water.

Richie gasps when he finally breaks free.

He must cough out his lungs, or maybe enough water to fill a lake, but eventually the coughing subsides and his breaths start to even out and he starts to register the sun shining above. It’s daytime. He’s back in the quarry. Back where it all began.

Richie starts to cry in earnest.

It had all been for nothing, then, hadn’t it? Everything he had gone through. Everything he’d sacrificed. Maybe Maturin had been a figment of his imagination. Richie doesn’t think any time has passed at all since he first jumped into the quarry. Perhaps he hit his head on a rock and Maturin was a concussed dream and a last-ditch ever.

“Fuck,” Richie murmurs. “Damnit.”

He wipes at his eyes again with the collar of his shirt. It doesn’t help much.

In the same way he had realized he wasn’t alone in the abyss, the same realization dawns on him now. It eases into his veins. Warm. Comforting.

There is someone else here with him.

Richie turns to face the shore. His heart is racing. If he were on dry land, he’s certain his hands would be sweating. He is too scared to hope.

But as he learned earlier, hope is a far more desperate thing to feel.

“Eds?”

On the shore, in a white t-shirt and soft-looking pants, looking whole and healthy and real, Eddie stands up off the rock he’d been resting on. There’s a tentative, surprised smile on his face. Relief is etched into his features.

“Hey, Richie,” Eddie breathes.


	2. pasts inside me i did not bury properly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s been a month,” he says. Eddie looks at him, but this time Richie won’t catch his eye. “We called her. They, uh. They had a funeral for you. Fuck, Eds, I mean. Fuck. You just came back from the fucking dead, dude. What the fuck do we do next?”
> 
> Eddie sighs. “Is there a manual for resurrection?”
> 
> “Yeah, some people call it the Bible,” Richie deadpans.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :) happy one year plus a few days since the clown movie came out guess what i finally finished woo woo
> 
> sorry this took so long in my defense i am me
> 
> ANYWAYS BIG THANKS to [cait](https://twitter.com/edskaspbraking) for beta reading this for me and to cait and [sabi](https://twitter.com/sabisuns) for being my personal cheerleaders throughout this part, they both let me send them many lines from this to test their reactions and i owe them my life

There is not cold, like he had expected there to be. There is not warmth, either. There is an absence of both, and there is an abundance of nothing.

He must be dead. Though if he is being honest, he had expected something other than nothingness. He is not a religious man, nor was he ever when he was alive, but he had expected that if there were awareness, there would also be surroundings.

There does not seem to be anything surrounding him.

He does not think he is alone.

It is hard to tell, here. Voices come and go, flitting through the emptiness like long-forgotten echoes. Voices he thinks he might recognize, if he were alive. Occasionally, there is crying. He still has not determined whether or not it is his own.

Sometimes he thinks he has a body.

There are moments where he thinks he can feel a gaping hole where he thinks his chest is. He remembers a claw, remembers blood staining his lips and remembers the gasps he struggled to take. The memories come and go. There is no consistent pattern, except for when he hears a certain voice. He feels the emptiness the most when he hears the voice.

He has yet to place the voice, though he is certain he knows it. Knew it. He thinks it will come to him soon.

Sometimes there are lights. Three of them, three spinning circles, and a woman’s voice. She is young and scared and she calls out to him. He sees red hair in fleeting images. She is as familiar as the voice that puts a chasm in his chest.

He has a name, he learns. The voices call it out. Some in mourning, others in agonized desperation. He thinks that some of the voices must be memories. He has a hard time imagining the voices calling out to him for this long. There are echoes of phrases, things he assumes were his last moments alive. On the rare occasion he can feel emotion, he is angry that he does not remember how he died. He is angry that he does not remember his name.

There are a few times he tries to feel for the hole in his chest. He still is not sure he has a body, but what he imagines is his chest feels solid under what he imagines is his hand, and it confuses him. He can feel himself bleeding out. He is missing a piece.

  
Of course, there is no heartbeat where he thinks his ribcage would be.

The lights whisper to him, when the voices are not around. There is a hole in the chest of the lights as well. Someone took out its beating heart and crushed it between their fingers. He wonders if the same has happened to him. But the lights grow dimmer each time he looks upon them. They are dying.

He feels exactly the same. He is not going anywhere.

On the day the three lights die, the air becomes warm. If smell existed here, it might be metallic. Like a drop of blood. He thinks it is given to him. With it, finally, comes a name. 

It is the first tangible thing he has had in this place, and he clings to it. Things are hard to cling to here but he is desperate. He finds a way. This is something real, and he has been floating for far too long. _This_ is a reason to fight, he thinks. _This_ is something he wants, he’s certain.

_Richie._

The wound in his chest is fresh. It must be, because he feels, suddenly, as though he is bleeding out all over again. There is an image of a man leaning over him. There is the feeling of fingers on his cheek. Gentle touches that beg just as much as the man’s voice does. There are tattered images that change like pictures in a projector. He clings to those, too. One of the faces belongs to Richie. He is not sure which one yet, but he knows it is one of them.

Christ. There is love so overwhelming it is pouring out of him. His mouth is dripping red and god, _god_ , there is so much he wants to say with it.

There is so much he didn’t get to say. Twenty-seven years worth of things he didn’t get to say. An opportunity to say the right thing and fucking it up anyway. God, Richie was so wrong about him. He was not brave at all. He loved his best friend in secret and then he left Derry and he loved his best friend in the corners of his mind. Where was the bravery in his last words?

Richie is the one who calls out to him, with the voice full of desperation. He is certain of that now.

The lights are dead now, finally gone, and they must have been shrouding him because it is their absence that finally brings him clarity, a path in the nothingness and all roads lead to Richie. And he can _feel_ again, too: anger and anguish and what must be an all-consuming love.

He is almost whole again, except for the hole in his chest. The last bit of him, the final part to make him whole must be in Richie’s hands, still. Even twenty-seven years later. Richie gives up pieces of his own self to make _him_ whole again, but the final piece is something he will have to find himself. Something he will have to seek out in Richie for everything to be slotted back into place.

_Yes. There it is._

_There_ is his bravery. There is what he has been waiting for, _hoping_ for, while suspended in the nothingness. Before he even remembered what hope felt like.

He is not a religious man, he remembers this much now, but he knows he has stared down the jaws of hell and it was not in this place. There is nothing down here that will stop him from returning. He finds his hands for the first time in what could be years, and he raises them until his fingertips hit dirt.

Dirt digs itself in amongst the hard earned blood underneath his fingernails. It doesn’t matter. There is a part of him that thinks it has to be harder than this, that there must be more to it than sifting through dirt with his hands. He is almost sure that he will come out on the other side and be faced with a monster even more frightening than anything he’s faced before. He is more certain, however, that the reward is worth the risk.

Richie’s warm laugh echoes in his ears, and he can’t tell if they are thirteen or forty, but he remembers what he is fighting for.

_Fuck that stupid fucking clown,_ he thinks desperately. His fingers strike a rock and he’s sure that the blood on his hands is fresh, but he doesn’t care. _Fuck that stupid clown that tried to kill me and fuck him for hurting Richie._

There’s Beverly’s voice ringing out, too. He wonders if she can see him. She was caught in the deadlights long before anyone else was. He knows she knew about his death. Will she know about his resurrection? Can she see him now, clawing his way from hell? He’s frightened to see himself. He is consumed, he has been ignited. Inside of him now is a life and a will to live that is far stronger than it ever was when he was alive. The voices of all of his friends fill his ears. He digs for them. He digs for all of them.

There is no way to tell time in the nothingness, and that doesn’t change as he starts to dig. Years could pass as he removes stone after stone, or perhaps it has only been minutes. He is unsure how long his fingers carve a path through the dirt, desperate and determined and unbothered by how long this could take. He has been given his body back and he won’t fuck it up this time.

His fingers breach the surface, and water floods the tunnel.

For the first time since his death, he opens his eyes.

The water is murky, but it’s still. He claws his way out of the dirt and immerses himself in the water. For a moment he sits, and he looks. He thinks he’s forgotten how to move. And he thinks he could stay here, forever, except for that he knows he’s human and that he shouldn’t be able to. It frightens him, then; the possibility of coming back as less than he was. He is unfamiliar with the shape of his hands and the way that his feet move, but he turns, eventually, and starts to raise his head up.

His gaze catches on something stuck in the dirt.

A pair of glasses. Unscathed, but a little bit muddy. Electricity courses through his veins. He knows those glasses.

_Richie,_ he thinks, and so he reaches out and grabs them.

He remembers how to kick his feet to swim upwards, and he keeps a tight grip on the glasses as he pulls himself up. It takes considerably less time for him to breach the surface of the water, and he feels more alive than he ever has as he breaks free.

He opens his jaw and gasps for air but there is nothing in his lungs. The sun is warm; he still feels cold, deep in his bones. It will be awhile before the blood starts to circulate through him again, he thinks. When he checks, his chest feels solid under his palm. He’s not sure whether or not he can feel the heartbeat yet.

He turns.

The quarry. He knows this place. At least, he used to. A memory. An echo of a version of him that he hasn’t been for a long time. This is not where his body was buried underneath piles of rubble, but it was a type of grave nonetheless. At least, it used to be.

Once Richie returns, he vows that they will both never return to this place.

“Fuck you,” he says, to the water. To the clown. To the house on Neibolt that took his childhood from him in 1989 and his life from him in 2016. To all the people who thought that he was nothing more than the boxes they placed him in. His voice is hoarse. His throat feels like it is filled with dirt. But he doesn’t care. He thinks about the lights dying around him, and he feels victorious. The deadlights are defeated. Pennywise is gone. And Eddie Kaspbrak crawled out of hell like it was fucking _nothing._

“Fuck you,” he says again, and he climbs out of the water. The sun beats down on his back. Warmth. He’d forgotten what that felt like. He’d forgotten what sand and rock under his feet felt like. Water against his legs. Clothes against his skin. A smile on his face. That comes most tentatively. Like he’d forgotten how to smile. Forgotten he had reasons to. Eddie sits down on a rock on the beach, facing the quarry water, and he raises his face to the sun, and he smiles.

He closes his eyes. He’s waiting for something, even if he can’t quite remember what. It’ll come to him, eventually. So will everything else, he hopes. The memories. What he’s lost. The heart beating in his chest.

Eddie holds a pair of glasses in his hands. Minutes ago, he’s certain he knew who they belonged to. They aren’t so easy to place, now. He knows they aren’t his. He sees fleeting images of a boy with messy dark hair and a crooked-toothed grin. This is who he is waiting for.

A turtle crawls slowly past him. Eddie watches, enraptured. Proof of life. Another creature in this place. The turtle stops, and raises its head. Looks right at Eddie.

Eddie tips an imaginary hat. “Sir,” he says politely.

The turtle tips his head back, and continues on his way.

A vibrant, childish laugh bursts from Eddie’s throat. He laughs carelessly. Throws his head back and laughs like he hasn’t in years. Laughs until the tears start streaming down his face and then he’s crying, curled up into himself, sitting on a rock on a beach somewhere in Maine, and then he laughs some more. Hiccuping through his tears. Proof of life.

Eddie presses his hand to his chest again. Thinks there’s a flicker of a heartbeat. He starts to cry again, this time in relief.

Eddie Kaspbrak is alive. It’s a beautiful thing.

Time passes. Eddie knows, because he counts it in the breaths he takes. There’s no indication of time passing in any other way. The sun stays in its place in the sky. No one drives through or passes by. If it weren’t for the warmth from the sun, the way it illuminates all of his surroundings, the feeling of his body taking up space, Eddie might think he was still stuck in that place.

But there was nothing there. There is everything here.

There is the sun, beating down on him. Not too warm, but warm enough. There is the sound of the trees in the breeze. There is green, as far as his eyes can see. Sand under his fingertips. Something briny and bitter coating his lips. Almost everything back in its place. A world _almost_ restored to the correct order.

Eddie tilts his head back and faces the sun, closing his eyes. He was never one for sitting out in the sun, he thinks. He remembers statistics about cancer and skin damage frightening him. He thinks it matters less now. Or perhaps it matters just as much, but he’s not the same as he used to be. Perhaps certain parts of him will remain dead. He thinks he’s okay with that.

Letting go. Moving on.

There’s peace in that. Relief.

Eddie sits up. As certain as the fact that he is alive, again, back from the dead, he knows now that something is changing. He’s not sure how he can tell. But he looks to the water. Thinks that whatever it is will find him there. It’s almost perfectly still, untouched by wind or current. The kind of stillness that real water never really achieves. More confirmation that time is waiting for him and whoever he waits for to catch up to it.

It’s quiet. Eddie kicks a rock across the beach.

Someone breaches the water, gasping.

Eddie watches, feeling struck to the core, frozen in place. Maybe he’s forgotten how to move his body again, except he knows that can't be true. Because he can’t remember himself being much of a runner but every atom in his body seems poised and ready, ready to take off, ready to dive into the water, ready to _run, let him run—_

In the water, the man turns to face him. Tears stream down his face. He shouldn’t be able to see—his glasses are in Eddie’s hand. But his jaw goes slack and he looks almost tragically hopeful, and his voice is unlike his own when he calls out, “Eds?”

Eddie stands up. Relief washes through him like baptisimal water. It’s etched into every part of him. He smiles.

“Hey, Richie,” he breathes out.

Richie pushes wet hair off his forehead. He blinks water out of his eyes. Eddie wonders what Richie sees when he looks to the shore. Wonders how he can tell that it's Eddie, alive and breathing. Does he just know? The same way Eddie had known that it would be Richie who met him here?

"You're," Richie starts. The rest of it never comes. He looks at Eddie for a moment, lost, and there’s a second of quiet between them before Richie starts to cough up the rest of the water in his lungs. He was gone for a long time, Eddie thinks.

"It'll subside," Eddie reassures him. He's not sure it's the truth. His throat still feels like it's filled with dirt. But Richie looks at him in relief, anyway, and that makes it worth it. He swims, halfheartedly, towards the shore, until Eddie meets him halfway and helps him out of the water. “Not the worst thing that’s come out of your mouth, anyway.”

Richie lets out a startled laugh. He flails back, like he can't believe the sound just came out of him. There's something different about him. Hell, there's a lot that's different about him. Twenty seven years of time between them, and Eddie recognizes the man he holds in his arms just as much as he wonders who the hell he could be.

But there's more to it, too. The Richie he met, when he came back to Derry. He thinks that Richie is gone. He wonders what they'll have to do to get that back. "Fuck you, dude, I think I just drowned."

"Well, it didn't stick," Eddie says conversationally. Richie looks at him in disbelief, but it's only for a moment before he starts laughing again. Boisterous laughter that echoes throughout the quarry, joy that makes the quarry seem brighter. Better.

"You sure you aren't the comedian here?" Richie asks.

Eddie shrugs. "If that's the case, then I have to start charging. How's by the hour sound?"

"Dude, you can have all my fucking money if it means I get to hear your voice again," Richie says. He seems to realize what he's said a moment too late, slapping a hand over his mouth.

"Richie," Eddie starts to say.

Richie's shaking his head. He says, "No. Nope," and pulls himself away from Eddie. He walks further up the beach, shrugging his button up off his shoulders and halfheartedly wringing it out into the sand. He says, in a small voice that's nothing like his own, "Can we just act like I didn't say that?"

Eddie opens his mouth.

"At least for now?" Richie presses, and Eddie's chest cracks open.

"For now," he allows. He peers at Richie curiously. Waits for Richie to turn around and face him again. He feels young, almost childish, but he asks, "Can we go now?"

Richie squints uncertainly. One of his eyes squints more than the other. Eddie allows himself a brief moment to be endeared by it. He repeats, "Go?"

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Unless we’re planning on living in the quarry? Because I can think of at least seven other places that would be better.”

"We?" Richie echoes. A broken record, stuck on the same bits.

Reality comes crashing down suddenly. Painful. Like when adrenaline fades and all that’s left is the sensation that something isn’t right. Eddie had surfaced, not long ago, unsure of what his next path would be but certain that it would be something he walked with Richie by his side. Now, he wonders if this is a pipe dream, some foolish notion he thought up in order to survive and make it out of there. Not the reality that comes with being resurrected. He looks away, unable to meet Richie's eye now. "I guess. I don't know. I thought we could go together. But we don't have to, if you'd rather go alone."

"If I'd rather—" Richie starts, but he seems to realize that he's just saying the same things over and over again, because he shakes his head again. He takes an uncertain step towards Eddie. "Eds, do you. What do you remember?"

Eddie glances at him. He remembers enough. He doesn't remember anything. It's hard to tell; there are a few things that stick out, sore thumbs among the rest of it. He pulls on them and gives them to Richie.

"I remember coming back to Derry," he says. Crashing his car the second he heard Mike's voice. Fighting with Myra about whether or not he really needed to make it out. "I remember seeing everyone again." The pit in his stomach the second he saw Mike and Bill. Not a bad feeling, but a new one. The way the world stopped spinning for a second, when the gong rang out. Seeing Richie and everything in his head slotting into place. "I remember. The clown. I remember the leper."

God, he'd been so frightened. Thinking back now, he thinks it's got less to do with the clown and more to do with the fact that twenty years had gone by and he hadn't changed at all. Frightened that they'd win and that he'd go back to the mundane life he didn't choose for himself and that he'd keep on living as someone he hated.

What was worse? To live and to be someone you don't recognize, or to die without reaching your potential? He supposes it doesn't matter now. He's got a second chance.

"Eddie," Richie says softly. Eddie's not particularly fond of the pitying look on his face. He knows Richie doesn't mean it to be belittling. "You... you died, Eds."

"I remember," Eddie murmurs. He presses a hand to his chest. Faint heartbeat. No gaping wound. There must be a scar, one he’ll live with forever. He thinks he's fine with that. He thinks about the abyss, the cavern, the afterlife—whatever he wants to call it—and he thinks about the sensation he felt of bleeding out over and over again. "Fuck, Richie."

"I know," Richie says. He's soaking wet and he still looks afraid. "Shit, Eddie, I'm fucking. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I know."

Eddie lets out a breathless, uncertain laugh. "Richie."

"Yeah, buddy, what is it?" Richie asks. Something about the way he says it makes Eddie think he's heard those words before. He can't quite place them, yet. He'll find it with time.

"I died," Eddie says. He laughs again. It shouldn't be funny. Richie isn't laughing. "I _died._ It didn't stick."

“Eddie,” Richie tries to say, then Eddie bends over and laughs so hard he nearly tumbles onto the ground. And that’s all it takes. Eddie laughing, without a care in the world. Richie throws his head back and he laughs, too. Eddie thinks the last time that he laughed like this must have been years ago. Must have been when he was a kid. Can't have been since he and Richie separated.

“Fuck,” Richie says with feeling, when he straightens back up. He wipes a tear from his eye. Eddie realizes, belatedly, that he’s still holding Richie’s glasses. He raises his hand. “Are those—are those my glasses? What the fuck.”

Eddie’s not entirely certain how he came in possession of the glasses or why he felt the need to hold them, but Richie seems to be glad to have them now. He slides them onto his nose and blinks, adjusting. Looks at Eddie clearly for the first time in over twenty years. “Found them in the water,” he explains.

Richie keeps looking at him. He looks a thousand miles away. Eddie wants to reach out and put his hand on Richie’s cheek. He’s the one who came back from the dead, but Richie’s the ghost, now. It cuts Eddie open more than any stupid old claw ever could.

“Come on,” Richie says finally. He fixes his gaze on a spot above Eddie’s head. “We should get outta here.”

* * *

In the car, Eddie watches out the window.

He's quiet, in a way he doesn't think he normally is. In a way he knows makes Richie nervous, because Richie keeps shooting glances his way that he thinks Eddie can't see. Eddie folds himself into the passenger seat, as best as he can being fully grown. He loses track of his sentences a lot. Forgets what he was saying or how to say it. Gets distracted by the things outside the window. He can feel the worry radiating off of Richie in waves.

“How are you—” Richie starts.

“Still feel fine, Rich,” Eddie interrupts. He rolls his head until he can catch Richie’s gaze. He gives Richie a small smile, hoping it reassures him. “Where are you taking us, man?”

Richie startles. “Oh, uh,” he says. He flips on the turn signal and waits for the road to clear. “Back to the townhouse. Your, um. Your bags are still there. I thought maybe you’d want. Your stuff.”

For a moment, Eddie can’t comprehend what he means. Then it comes back to him, slowly. His bags. He traveled here. His life, though it started again here, is not in Derry.

“Myra,” Eddie realizes.

Richie stiffens next to him.

“It’s been a month,” he says. Eddie looks at him, but this time Richie won’t catch his eye. “We called her. They, uh. They had a funeral for you. Fuck, Eds, I mean. Fuck. You just came back from the fucking dead, dude. What the fuck do we do next?”

Eddie sighs. “Is there a manual for resurrection?”

“Yeah, some people call it the Bible,” Richie deadpans. Eddie shoots him a sharp look. Richie manages a small laugh, which Eddie matches. “Okay, poor joke. But, seriously. Oh, fuck, I have to. I have to tell everyone.”

“Tell everyone?” Eddie asks. He furrows his brow.

Richie looks at him like he’s been punched in the chest. “The Losers?”

Eddie hates how long it takes for his brain to supply the memories. Hates that he makes Richie panic when he’s not able to recall things. It comes back to him. It all does, slowly. He sees flickering images of them as kids, first. Hears their laughter and their raised voices as they all try to talk over one another. Sees the flashes of a camera and snapshots of them growing up together and growing smaller as more and more people moved away. All of them coming back. Not all of them. Being surrounded by them, in the end.

“They left?” Eddie says. He shakes his head, embarrassed that he’s hurt by it. It’s been a month; of course they left. “No, sorry. Obviously. How… how is everyone?”

Richie parks his car in front of a building. It takes Eddie fifteen seconds to place it as the Townhouse. He knows, because he counts the seconds before Richie speaks. “Ben and Bev are together,” he says. Eddie lets out a small laugh.

“Finally,” he says.

“You’re telling me,” Richie mutters. “Been insufferable the last month. Bill and Mike are travelling together. I think they’re somewhere in Wyoming, now. Pretty sure they’re gonna announce that they’re a thing, as soon as Bill’s divorce goes through.”

Eddie startles. “Whoa, for real?”

Richie laughs, a little. An amused huff of air. Eddie remembers, almost right away, being a teenager and cataloguing all of Richie’s laughs. It takes him a little bit longer to place what this particular one is. “Yeah, for real. I was fifth-wheeling it pretty bad there, for a bit, between everyone. But. They’re happy. So.”

Bitter. That’s the laugh. The one he has when he thinks something is unfair.

Eddie wants to reach out and take Richie’s hand. Tries to remember if it’s something they’ve ever done before. It feels like they have. It’s what Eddie’s heart says, at least.

“What about you, Rich?” Eddie asks. “Are you happy?”

Richie looks at him. “I’m still here, dude,” he says helplessly. “I just brought you back from the dead. How do you. Fuck, Eddie. How do you think I am?”

Is that it? Is that the piece that Eddie had been missing? The fact that Richie is the reason he’s even here at all? He feels like it proves something. He’s not sure what.

“You brought me back,” he repeats. His turn to be a broken record. A groove he doesn’t want to dig himself out of. Richie brought him back. Why does it mean something? Why does it mean everything? Eddie still can’t remember whether or not he’s ever held Richie’s hand. It’s the most important thing he could remember, and it fails him now.

Richie drops his gaze. “Yeah,” he breathes. His eyes squeeze shut. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Eddie recoils like he’s been slapped. “You’re sorry for bringing me back?”

“Fuck, no!” Richie scrambles. He fights against his seatbelt, struggling to undo it, before he finally manages it and turns in his seat to face Eddie. His expression is so serious it’s almost severe as he says, “Eds, need you to hear me right now. I won’t ever regret that, yeah? That was the smartest fucking thing I’ve ever done. I don’t. I still don’t even know how I did it.”

“Yeah, we should talk about that,” Eddie says, a little bit hysterical.

Richie nods. “We will, man. But I mean it. I won’t regret that. I just meant. I was stupid to think. No. Sorry, it’s.” He sighs and turns back in his seat, putting both hands on the wheel and leaning forward til he can drop his forehead on it. “I’m not making any sense.”

Gently, Eddie says, “I’m used to that.”

“Fuck you,” Richie bites around a laugh. “I can’t explain it without starting at the beginning. But I’m not. I’m not starting anything until I get this quarry water off of me. Then, there’s. Then. Fuck. Okay, then there’s somewhere I want to take you.”

Eddie reaches forward and puts his hand on Richie’s forearm. He squeezes, reassuring. It’s not quite what he wants to do, but it fills the need. Richie lifts his head in surprise. “Anywhere you wanna go, Rich.”

Richie looks at him, in a way that Eddie thinks no one ever has before. Except for Richie, he realizes. Richie always used to look at him like this. He swallows thickly. Whatever he wants to say, he keeps to himself for now.

“Let’s get changed,” he says finally, and he leads Eddie into the Townhouse.

His bags are exactly the way he left them, when he died. It startles him that he remembers it so vividly. He touches his old clothes and pulls out shirts he remembers but doesn’t quite recognize. Richie sits quietly, and waits for him. He has a pile of clothes in his arms. Richie waits until Eddie’s found something of his own to change into, a pair of comfortable jeans he’s been meaning to throw away and a short-sleeved button up shirt. Richie shows Eddie to the bathroom. He hesitates at the door.

“Richie,” Eddie says.

“Mmhm?”

He swallows. “I can do this part on my own.”

Richie lets out a small laugh. “I know you can, bud. Guess I’m just. I don’t know. Little nervous to leave you behind. Last time I did that, I came back too late.”

“Hm,” Eddie says. For the first time since he came back to life, he lets himself wonder how the fuck Richie must have felt. Wonders what caused Richie to ache so desperately that he found a way to defy the laws of nature and bring someone back from the dead.

“Sorry,” Richie mumbles. “Too soon for talking about your death, I bet.”

Eddie catches Richie’s gaze. “Don’t apologize. You brought me back. You get to make as many jokes as you want.”

Richie gives him a small smile.

“I’ll be fine,” Eddie promises. “Come check on me when you’re done. Promise I’ll still be breathing.”

It startles him, then, when Richie’s eyes well with tears. Richie looks away quickly, so fast that Eddie has to wonder if he imagined them. Still, his voice is rough as he says, “Yeah, I’ll kill you myself if you break that promise,” and then he’s out the door without a second’s warning.

So Eddie showers. He examines the scar on his chest. The scar on his cheek. Traces his fingers over the raised, marred skin. He thinks that he should find it ugly. He doesn’t.

He thinks he should be panicking.

He doesn’t.

The shower feels nice. Warmth, he remembers, is one of the best things to feel. He stands under the water for far longer than he should. Longer, probably, than he ever has before. He lathers shampoo into his hair and rinses it out and he does it again, just for an excuse to stay in a little longer. Rinses off the quarry water and the sand and the dirt under his fingernails. He’d called the relief that had washed through him upon Richie’s return earlier baptisimal water. He feels the same way now.

Eventually he remembers Richie. Thinks about his subtle distress. Thinks about him, likely sitting on the bed in Eddie’s room, waiting. If he knows Richie at all, which he does, he’s probably made Richie wait for long enough that he’s considering barging into the bathroom just to make sure Eddie’s still standing upright.

He turns off the shower water and wraps a towel around his waist.

It’s steamy in the bathroom. He uses the hand towel to wipe the mirror. His expression stares back at him. It’s a face he recognizes. The same body he inhabited before, with new scar tissue. Eddie sighs.

There’s a knock at the door. “Sorry,” Richie calls through. He sounds embarrassed. “I just. I have to check.”

“I’m okay,” Eddie says back, softly. He’s pretty sure he means it.

He can hear the breath of relief that Richie lets out. Eddie moves quickly after that, sliding on his underwear and jeans and slipping the shirt over his shoulders. He hesitates before buttoning it up, opening the cabinet mirror and sighing when he finds it empty. Eddie cracks the door open and peers out at Richie who is, indeed, sitting on the bed. Richie stands up awkwardly, stumbling over his own feet. It’s endearing in a way that makes Eddie’s head hurt.

“Do I have a toothbrush?” he asks, a little bit shy. Richie digs it out of the suitcase and hands it to him.

“Oh,” Richie says, right as Eddie goes to turn. His eyes are on Eddie’s chest. On the scar. Almost like he’s unaware of it, Richie reaches up. His fingers brush against the marred skin. It’s a touch softer than Eddie thinks he deserves. It’s a touch that’s a kind of gentle that Eddie feels like it must have happened before. He wonders why it puts butterflies in his stomach like it’s the first time, anyway. Richie pulls his hand away. “Fuck. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie says honestly. Richie looks at him uncertainly. “I had to look at it, too.”

“Does it hurt?” Richie asks.

Eddie shrugs. “Not as much as the rest of it did.”

He leaves the door open as he goes to brush his teeth. Takes his time. Mundane, human things that he never really thought about before but doesn’t want to take for granted now. He remembers he liked feeling clean before. Now he thinks he just likes that he can feel.

Richie’s fiddling on his phone, when Eddie finally leaves the bathroom, buttoning up his shirt. Richie puts the phone down on the bed as Eddie faces him.

“Good?” Eddie asks.

“Yeah, I just texted Patty,” Richie murmurs. Eddie furrows his brow. “Stan’s Patty. His wife. I… told her she needs to come out here. Something happened, while I was. While I was down there. I think she can bring Stan back. If there’s a possibility, I… I think I owe her that much.”

Eddie leans against the door, feeling heavy. “Fuck,” he breathes.

Richie lets out a long sigh. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Had a lot of conversations with Patty recently. All of them have been fucking hard. But she… I don’t know. I said you need to come out here, I found something, and she said okay.”

“Just like that?” Eddie asks, startled.

Richie glances up at him. “I think she was ready for a reason to get out of that house.”

“God, Richie,” Eddie says. “Jesus Christ.”

Richie takes a halted step towards him. All of his movements are so uncertain. It makes it hard for Eddie to breathe. “I get it,” Richie tells him. “She needed a reason to get out. I kept finding reasons to stay. I don’t know. Patty and I, I think we’re a lot more similar than we thought we’d be.”

Eddie nods to himself. “Stan was your best friend,” he tells him. “It makes sense that you’d get along with his wife, even without him.”

“Fuck,” Richie says, with feeling. “Alright. Let’s get the fuck out of here, please? Feel like I’m gonna die if I inhale one more mothball.”

Derry’s small, so it doesn’t take long to get places. They’re quiet during the drive, too. Eddie stares out the window and counts all the ways that Derry has changed. It feels different now that the clown is gone, too. Looking at it carefully, he can see how Richie was able to stay.

Richie fiddles with the radio and he taps his fingers against the steering wheel and he resolutely looks everywhere but at Eddie. It would bother him more, except Eddie thinks that Richie’s embarrassed. What Richie has to be embarrassed about in Derry is beyond him.

Richie parks his car in front of an unnoteworthy bridge. He pulls his key out of the ignition and turns to face Eddie. “Figure this is as good a place as any to catch you up,” Richie says. He gives Eddie a timid, almost charming smile. “Take a walk with me.”

They cross the bridge quietly, until Richie finds a spot he deems worthy and leans up against it. He waits until Eddie mirrors him. Eddie thinks Richie must find it easier, talking like this. Explaining what he went through without needing to look at Eddie directly.

But he doesn’t talk. He still needs a little nudge there, it seems.

“So?” Eddie asks. “How’d you do it?”

“Do what?”

Eddie rolls his eyes. He’s not sure if it’s a bit, Richie acting like this, but it riles Eddie up all the same. “Tie your shoelaces this morning, obviously. Did you actually graduate high school? Fuck’s sake, Richie, how’d you bring me back to life?”

Richie kicks a rock further down the bridge. His hands are shoved deep into his jacket pockets. “I was desperate,” he admits with a sigh. “Fucking… I don’t know. I felt trapped here. Didn’t want to leave until I’d exhausted every resource. Bev, she, uh. She told us that one of the manifestations she saw told her that nothing in Derry ever really dies. Think she regretted it, afterwards, because she could tell I latched onto it. But it. It didn’t matter that it was something _it_ said, you know? ‘Cause it felt like it had to be true.”

Eddie opens his arms wide, gesturing to himself. Richie almost laughs. “Well, clearly some part of it was true.”

“I guess,” Richie allows. “I think I was just miserable and not ready to move on. But. I met this girl. Reminds me so much of Bev it was almost scary. And she told me to go back to the place where it all began. So I did. And I met Maturin.”

“It’s always another guy,” Eddie sighs dramatically. He bumps Richie’s shoulder teasingly, and they both let out a halfhearted chuckle.

Richie’s cheeks are pink. “Shut up. He told me I could bring you back. So I did.”

“What did it cost?” Eddie asks.

The way that Richie looks at him splits him in two. “Does it matter? It gave you back.”

“Does it—Richie, of course it fucking matters,” Eddie says. He pushes off the bridge, pacing. Nervous, suddenly, that Richie gave up more than he should have just to bring Richie back. “Was it. I mean, _fuck,_ did you make a fucking deal with the devil? Ten years to live before your soul is taken in my place?”

“What kind of fucking tv shows do you watch?” Richie asks incredulously. “No, I didn’t make a fucking deal with the devil. He tried to barter with us once already, and we didn’t take it. No, Eds, fuck. I gave something I’d give again. Fuck, I’d give all of them for this. Just fucking memories, dude. Pieces of me. Things I never wanted to forget.”

Eddie stops in place. The world seems to be spinning slower than ever around them. “You gave up memories?”

And Richie just _shrugs._ “I have enough.”

Helplessly, Eddie says, “So there’s stuff you don’t remember?”

“Figure you can hold onto it for me,” Richie says. He drops his gaze again, digging the toes of his shoe into the rocks and scattering a few more. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“I still don’t understand,” Eddie says. “What did your memories have to do with me?”

Richie doesn’t look up. It’s quiet for a beat, or two, or three, before he slides to the side and turns so he can crouch in front of a spot on the bridge. With a shaking finger, he points. One carving, amongst a hundred. R+E.

“Richie?” he asks.

“Plus Eddie,” Richie confirms. He traces his fingers along the lines. Eddie can’t remember this. Can’t remember a version of their history where they carved this. He crouches down and touches the lines that form the ‘E’, in the hopes that it would make it clearer. Bring the memory back better. Richie continues, “I carved this when we were thirteen. Never told anyone about it.”

Eddie startles back. “You never told me?” he asks. He wonders how that can be true, when he’s so certain he felt the same.

“Dude, do you remember me at age thirteen? You think that dumbass kid had enough courage to tell anyone about his gay little crush on his best friend?” Richie asks. He stands up with a groan, joints popping. He extends a hand down to help Eddie up, too. “But I came back. Carved it again. Then I called Bev and came out to her. Bawled like a little bitch on the phone. It was honestly a little embarrassing.”

“Richie,” Eddie says again, with more feeling. “God, this is.”

Richie shifts his weight and drops Eddie’s hand. Shoves both his hands back into his own pockets. “This is why,” he finishes. “Why I brought you back. Why I gave up my memories. They belonged to you anyway, man. Best parts of my life had you in them. Fucking sucked, reliving them. Going through it all again and not knowing for sure that. Fuck, I don’t know. Not knowing that I’d actually get you back, but. Whatever. I mean. I don’t regret it. I really don’t.”

Eddie searches Richie’s face for the answers he knows Richie won’t speak out loud. “What do you regret, then?” he asks.

“Maturin told me something,” Richie says slowly. “He said. This wouldn’t work, if… It wouldn’t work if I wasn’t loved in return. And like shit, Eddie, I don’t expect anything from you, I really don’t. I would never. I brought you back so that you could be back and that’s. I mean, that’s enough, you know? You being here.”

“Oh,” Eddie breathes.

Richie laughs humorlessly. “Yeah, I. Yeah.”

Eddie never said anything, when they were younger. He never said anything when they were forty. It’s why he has a wife. Had a wife. The logistics seem unimportant right now. It’s why he felt the need to hold Richie’s hand but was unable to find any memory of him doing so in the past, any indication that it would be okay. Eddie loved Richie quietly. He wasn’t even aware of it, not really.

The way he loves Richie now is roaring out of him. There’s nothing quiet about it.

“You brought me back because you love me,” Eddie says.

Richie looks at him brokenly. Eddie feels desperate to make Richie understand. “Yeah,” Richie agrees, small. Timid. Eddie doesn’t _want_ that. Eddie wants to be loved loudly, too.

“The memories you sacrificed, they gave parts of me back,” Eddie continues. He reaches forward, _finally,_ and grabs onto Richie’s hands. Holds on tight and doesn’t let Richie pull away. “They brought me back. That worked, because you love me.”

“Eddie,” Richie tries to say, and when he goes to pull away Eddie holds on tighter.

“Richie, fuck, please just,” Eddie says frantically. “Maturin said it wouldn’t work if I didn’t feel the same, right? That’s what he said?”

Richie shrugs. “He just said unless I was loved in return.”

“You idiot,” Eddie breathes. He lets go of Richie’s hands so he can reach up and cup Richie’s face, gently. “Rich. I can’t believe I have to spell this out for you like this. I had to love you back for it to work. I _had_ to love you back. I love you back.”

“Eddie, I can’t,” Richie starts. He squeezes his eyes shut. “There’s. Eddie, I carved my fucking heart onto that bridge, can’t you see that? I’m in love with you. You don’t feel the same way, you can’t, you—”

Eddie’s heart is pounding in his chest. He’s so aware of it, he can feel it in his throat. It’s no longer a shadow of a beat, no longer faint inside of him. The last piece he was missing comes back and completes him the second that Richie says _I’m in love with you,_ and Eddie presses up on his toes and pulls Richie down and kisses him.

It’s perfect, then, of course, that the first thing that happens to him when he’s finally, _finally_ whole, is Richie kissing him back.

There’s a moment where Richie hesitates, where he makes a noise of surprise against Eddie’s mouth, but it’s only a moment before he puts his hands on Eddie’s hips and slots them closer together and kisses Eddie back.

Eddie _kisses_ Richie. He knows he’s waited a long time for this.

He feels feverish, once they start. He never wants to stop. He thinks he could grow addicted to the way that Richie’s mouth moves against his. Addicted to the shy way that Richie presses the tip of his tongue to the seam of Eddie’s lips. Addicted to the sound that Richie makes when Eddie lets him deepen the kiss. He thinks they could do this forever, and it’d be fine.

Fuck, Richie _loves_ him. Richie’s in love with him. Somehow, the power behind that was enough to bring Eddie back to fucking life.

Eddie breaks the kiss, for long enough to say the words against Richie’s lips, “I’m in love with you, I love you, I love you.” Richie swallows them all and says it back by kissing Eddie harder.

Eventually they do end the kiss, because as desperate as they feel to be close to one another, it is daylight in a small town in Maine, and Eddie’s new lungs aren’t quite ready for kissing like this. Richie laughs, a little bit breathless himself, when Eddie tells him such, and he presses a kiss to Eddie’s forehead.

“Well, what the fuck,” Richie says. Eddie hums against his chest. “You love me back.”

“I’ve been _saying,_ ” Eddie grumbles.

Richie’s shoulders shake with quiet laughter. “Yeah, I heard you, bud.”

And Eddie realizes Richie still doesn’t quite understand. He pulls back enough that he can look Richie in the eye again. Hopes his expression is serious enough that Richie believes him right away. “No, Rich. I’ve _been_ saying. Said it before. When we were kids. When we reunited. When you brought me back to life. I’ve been telling you I love you for thirty years.”

Richie taps the side of his head. “I’m gonna have to believe you, cause it seems I’m missing a memory or two. I think you’re gonna have to remind me. Maybe even every day.”

“Hm,” Eddie says, but he’s laughing despite his attempts to sound petulant. “And how would you suggest I remind you?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Richie tells him. Eddie kisses him again, just to shut him up. Richie’s laughing too much for it to be a real kiss. “We still have a lot to do, you know. Gotta tell the others. Gotta bring Stan back. Gotta retract your death statement so you can, like, get a job or have a license.”

Eddie shrugs. “We have time.”

“Okay, so, who are you and what have you done with Eddie Kaspbrak? The kid I knew would have been making an itemized list by now and diving in,” Richie teases.

“Not a kid anymore,” Eddie tells him. “And dying and coming back to life will do wonders to your anal-retentive tendencies.”

He realizes what’s coming a moment too late, and Richie wraps his arms tightly around Eddie as Richie says loudly, “I’ll show you anal-retentive tendencies!” And Richie lets out a cackling, vibrant laugh when Eddie shoves his face away and shouts back, “That doesn’t even make sense!”

Still, he kisses Richie again, and once more once they’re back in his car. He’s sure he’ll do it again, after they get through some of the stuff they have to do. But for now, Eddie extends his hand to Richie and waits until Richie twines their fingers together, and he lifts their hands so he can press a kiss to Richie’s knuckle.

“Well?” Richie asks. “Where to?”

“You know better than me,” Eddie says honestly. It strikes him, then, that their memories are split between them. That they’re going to build a future together as they stitch up the missing parts of their past.

Richie squeezes their intertwined hands. “We should go call our friends.”

“Okay,” Eddie agrees easily. He looks at Richie, eyes shining. Richie smiles softly back at him. “Take us home. And let me tell you about the first time I told you I love you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that's a wrap! i hope it was worth the wait.
> 
> you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/SPACERICHlE) if you want to come say hello!

**Author's Note:**

> and that's it for part one!
> 
> you can find me on [tumblr](https://rchtoziers.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/SPACERICHlE) if you want to come say hello!


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